Other Gods
by Marquis Carabas
Summary: The world of Coraline crosses paths with beings from the works of H. P. Lovecraft.  Rated T for assorted profanites, violence, and  hopefully  some horror.
1. Three Familiar Faces

**Hello, all ye who clicked here.**

**This is my first attempt at a piece of fan-fiction or semi-serious writing. Any constructive criticism you have will be eagerly accepted and pounced upon like an oblivious mouse before a particularly ravenous kitten.**

* * *

As the sun set on what was left of the garden party, Coraline found herself thinking of a piece of advice from her grandfather.

At her grandfather's ninetieth birthday party, when Coraline was six, she had asked him how he had lived to such a great age.

Everett Jones had been a huge man, even in his old age, with bushy sideburns and moustaches that Mr Bobinsky would envy. He had knelt down to the young Coraline, and in a whisper that bordered on shouting, he confided "Live your life like a grand party, petal, but leave the cleaning-up for some other poor bastard. That's my secret."

He winked and said "And don't tell your mother I used that word." He then inflicted a boiled sweet upon Coraline, and went off to drink his nephews under the table, and could be found still standing four hours later bellowing "Who's up for some tequilas?"

As Coraline shoved the last pizza-box into a garbage bag, she found herself wishing she had followed the man's advice after the garden party. It was hard to imagine a more tedious job than cleaning up.

Everett Jones had died true to his word, perishing in a freak bungee jumping accident two years later and, as always, leaving the cleaning up to others. Coraline still sometimes missed the old man.

Mr Bobinsky had withdrawn upstairs, claiming that the _moushkas_ needed to practise before they slept, otherwise their notes would be all out of sync the next morning. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible left shortly after Bobinsky, a cluster of dogs trotting behind them. Wybie had left with his grandmother, who had spent most of the party either listening intently to Coraline or deflecting flirtation from Mr Bobinsky. Mostly listening.

"You know," she had said, after Coraline had finished her story, "It reminds a lot of the fairy-stories I heard when I was a girl, younger than you, even. Young person discovers another world, finds evil there, vanquishes evil, and returns with hard-learned lessons and a head full of memories." At that, the corners of her lips turned upwards in a smile. "You and my grandson saw it off for good, then?" She nodded at Wybie, who had been waylaid by Miss Forcible and was currently being treated to a long talk about the importance of one's bust when deciding upon a character role on the stage.

"Definitely," said Coraline. "The hand and key are at the bottom of the old well, and the door's locked. The Other Mother will never get out."

"Good." said Miss Lovat, in a grim, satisfied tone. Then, in a softer, curious tone, "Tell me...did you see my sister?"

The conversation had continued for a few more hours, until the sun began to sink below the horizon and Wybie managed to disengage himself from Miss Forcible. Miss Lovat had left satisfied.

Coraline now stared out across the darkening garden, at peace with herself and the world. The evening was warm, and crickets sang in the trees.

Charlie took advantage of her inattention to sneak up behind her and ruffle her hair.

"Da-_ad_!"

Charlie chuckled and took the garbage bag from Coraline. "Busy day, fusspot?"

"Not too bad," said Coraline. "What did you think of the garden?"

"It's beautiful," said Charlie, looking at the massed ranks of tulips (and avoiding commenting on the newly-sprung beet patch). "I don't know where you found the energy." He gave Coraline a knowing smile. "Here's hoping you'll still have that much energy next week."

"Next week?"

"Next week, yeah. Thats when you start school, remember?" He ruffled Coraline's hair again and walked inside with the garbage bag.

Behind him, Coraline groaned as the memory of school came rushing back.

If she had known any profanity other than "bastard", she would have gladly repeated it.

* * *

It was night-time in Rhode Island, with the moon hanging full and thick in the still air.

The old man on the white stone porch admired the familiar sight of the moon, his gaze running over the craters, the ridges, the seas and mottling.

_The bloated pretentious sphere stabbed out from the encompassing darkness_, he thought, _full and redolent of the by-gone glories of diminished and faded ages, where the...the...um. The..._

He sighed. Inspiration struck so rarely these days, and he found it harder to bring his old talent to bear.

Of course, he supposed he couldn't really write about what he had once handled with such skill. Not since all the... He shied away from that memory.

_Concentrate on the here and now, old boy_, he admonished himself. _The world needs you now, more than ever_.

He was a tall, thin man, with a long face and short silver hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. He picked up one of the newspapers lying next to him in a heap, and scrutinised it, page, by page, through metal-framed glasses.

He didn't notice the woman gliding up the front path towards him until she coughed.

"Good evening, my dear," he said, putting down the paper. "I trust your tickets are booked?"

"Of course," the woman said with a smile. "By next week, I'll be imparting all my hard-earned knowledge to the children of Oregon."

"Heaven help them," said the man, and ducked a playful swat. "Go on, Abra. Put that degree to good use. And take care of yourself out there. It's on the Pacific, after all. We all know what that entails."

"I'll be okay. It's just..." Here she hesitated. "Look, are you sure you can cope with me leaving? The nights are getting darker, and you're not getting any younger. If they decide to..."

"Pish. I've had a lifetime's experience of surviving their actions. Besides, we're undermanned on the West Coast. I'm glad you're taking a station there."

"Very well." Her face softened once more. "Remember to write to me, you old goat. I know what you're like for neglecting correspondence."

They exchanged farewells, and Abra left the way she'd came. The man picked up his newspaper, and went through every page.

His interest especially lay in those articles outlining anything relating to the ocean, strange accidents, cases of insanity, and supernatural sightings.

* * *

In the white void between worlds, the Beldam dangled from her unwound web. She had torn it apart in a rage, her fury and desperation seeking an outlet, and what was left of her world hung down around her ears.

As loathe as she was to admit it, the Beldam had _lost_.

Her plans had been shattered by that girl and that...that _vermin_, her hand had been destroyed at the well by that other child, whatever energy she had had before the whole affair had been wasted on the world she had made.

The garden, the food, the circus, the theatre, the other father and that other boy...her greatest works had been rejected by a mere child, a girl of low cunning and lower gratitude. A child who had outwitted her at every turn and denied her a victory.

She hung alone, with nothing but grey strands of web and her ebbing strength as companions.

The door, which hung in mid-air, swung slightly ajar.

Alarm shot across her face at this last realisation, and she lurched up and scuttled her way up the web to face the tiny door.

The Passage Between Worlds waited, mocking her with its silence. She grovelled to it, a feat easier said than done when all of your legs are keeping hold of a strand of web.

"My lord..." she began, hesitantly, fearfully. "I...I can explain."

+No need,+ thought the Passage, its dead voice echoing through the Beldam's skull. +I saw it all myself.+

The Beldam cringed and lowered her head further.

"It was...she was too devious for..."

+Deviousness is your speciality. Pardon me for a hasty first impression, but I considered you to be intelligent enough to deal with any mortal.+

"My lord!" the Beldam wailed, curling up into herself. "There will be other children. Other sources of strength, of energy, other souls for me to gain! Just … just give me energy, my lord, energy enough to build a new world, and I will never fail you again, never!"

She hung in the void, drained and defeated, and all too aware of her likely fate.

+It seems,+ the Passage whispered, after having drawn out the silence for an agonising few moments, +That you have forgotten the bargain we struck. You give nourishment to _me_, Beldam. The reverse is not true. You merely listen, and obey, and survive _on my sufferance_.+

+Your importance was minimal before. After this affair, you are nothing but a hindrance. I have other sources of nourishment, and you are not one of my greater servants.+

As it spoke, it released the bindings on the passageway between worlds, which flickered and vanished behind it. It raised itself in the air, becoming its true form. Its gaze fixed the Beldam in place with a cold intensity.

The best job the Beldam could do of describing its true form was "something out of the ordinary."

+But...+ it hesitated. It seemed to be considering something, giving hope to the Beldam. +Do you swear to truly serve me? Do you swear to provide me with a source of nourishment?+

"Of course, Lord Zoth-Ommog," gabbled the Beldam, giddy with relief. "I swear to those, Dweller in the Depths, I bind my life and soul to them."

+Then hold still,+ Zoth-Ommog said, its jaws flying open in a parody of a grin, and its head bending down to the Beldam, who could do nothing but scream in the last moments of her life.

After it had sated its hunger, Zoth-Ommog turned its head up, as if to regard something on the horizon.

+My parent must be informed of this.+ it mused to the remaining web strands.

It faded away into nothing, vanishing from the void, whilst the web-strands rotted away.


	2. The Man in White

**For anyone reading reading this who might be American; I'm from the other side of the Atlantic, and my information on middle schools comes from a hasty Wikipedia search. If any of it is greviously wrong, ascribe it to ignorance rather than maliciousness.**

* * *

School wasn't as bad Coraline had feared. It was worse.

The uniforms, in all their splendid shades of gray, had turned out to be the most appealing thing about Derleth Middle School. The cafeteria food left a lot to be desired (such as good taste, variety, consistency etc.), everyone apart from Wybie and herself had formed themselves into comfortable, insular cliques with "No New Members" policies, and the classes and teachers, needless to say, weren't a patch on her old school.

Case in point, Miss Abra Alhazred, Coraline's teacher for English.

"Coraline! Pay attention!"

Ah, and because things weren't bad enough, her experiences over the summer had left her unable to concentrate on just about anything.

"Sorry, Miss Alhazred," said Coraline listlessly, while the rest of the class did their best to look too dutiful and absorbed in their work to notice, apart from Wybie, who gave her a sympathetic nod.

"What is it this time?" sighed Miss Alhazred, striding to Coraline's desk. She was slender and tall, with dark skin and deep brown eyes that suggested an Arabic ancestry. Her hand swept down and plucked the paper Coraline had been doodling on off the desk. "Drawing in class? Coraline, you're meant..."

Anyone who had been paying close attention to Miss Alhazred would have seen the flicker of unease and confusion pass over her face as she scanned the page. The paper held a rough drawing of a certain figure from Coraline's recent history. Button eyes, spider-esque appearance, hands like knitting needles. Rhymes with "Sheldam".

"...to be studying the text." she said with barely a wobble. "See me after class."

Coraline, for the second time in as many weeks, groaned as Miss Alhazred walked back to her desk, frowning over the paper all the while.

It just wasn't _fair_. Nobody else would talk to her or pay attention to her, (apart from Wybie, but for every time he made Coraline glad of his company, he also made her want to drop-kick him into a toilet) or even think about her. They just thought of her as "That out of state girl with blue hair who hangs about with Slug-Boy" and left it at that.

Coraline wished, more than ever, that she was back in Michigan. There, she had friends. There, she could talk to people without being ignored or being treated to a long, rambling conversation about whatever dorky thing had entered Wybie's head.

When the bell rang, announcing the beginning of Metal Shop, she welcomed it. There, she was teamed up with Wybie, whose demeanour concealed a savant-like ability with any piece of machinery. He was the delight of the Metal Shop teacher, Mr MacDonald, and the despair of nearly everyone else.

She was almost out the door before Miss Alhazred coughed in a meaningful manner. Coraline turned back to see Miss Alhazred brandishing the piece of paper.

"What," she began, as the last other student walked out (Wybie, who whispered "Don't worry, I'll make an early start on the welding!" as he passed Coraline.) ", is this?"

"It's … it's just something I was planning for Art, Miss Alhazred. I promise, I won't..."

"You're not telling me the truth," said Miss Alhazred, her face set and grim. "What is this a drawing of, Coraline?"

_Why is she so interested?_, thought Coraline. _Does she know about...?__ No. She can't. _Out loud, she said, "Miss Alhazred, I told you, it's a ..."

"Coraline," said Miss Alhazred, leaning in towards Coraline. "Please believe me when I say there could be a lot more at stake here than a detention. If I'm right in my suspicions, you're in so far over your head you can't even see the surface. I will ask you once, and once only. _ Where and when did you see the creature in this drawing?_"

* * *

_In the Red Hook neighbourhood in Brooklyn, there is a street that nobody enters._

_The street is derelict, with rubbish scattered across the pavements and rack and ruin besetting most of the buildings; but that isn't why nobody comes there. The street is quite simply a blind spot on the face of New York. Police, responding to some emergency, will never take this street as a short-cut. Pedestrians won't give it a first glance, never mind a second. Most of the grim, looming buildings clustered on either side are not lived in or used or even register on the mental radar of the average New Yorker. And nobody knows why, because next to nobody knows about it in the first place._

_This suits the purposes of a Mr Daniel Cain, who spends most of his time in the bookshop on this street, and by some peculiar osmosis, becomes another blind spot on the face of New York._

_He is a strange old recluse, who dabbled into a few things he shouldn't have when he was younger, acquired a multitude of painful and traumatising memories, and discovered this street. He lives amongst piles of old books and goes out unseen into the city to get food every week (which, being a conscientious man and possessing more than adequate funds, he leaves money on the till for.)_

_The bookshop he lives in is a proper, detached, foreboding, crenelated, Gothic-style bookshop. To look at it suggests you could get a few tomes of eldritch lore there, and at a discount. (You couldn't, at least not since 1937.)_

_And the most salient feature of the bookshop, on this misty and oppressive afternoon, is that it is on fire._

_The front door slams open, and Cain charges out, his hair and beard and coat singed and smeared. He spins on his heel and faces down something unseen behind a thick pall of smoke. He draws a pouch from his pocket and empties it into his right palm, some of the precious crystal powder caught by a breeze. He barks a few obscene phrases in a language that was dead when Babylon was young, and throws the powder at the unseen creature. There is the sound of frying bacon, an alien ululation of pain and rage, and then nothing but the crackle of leaping flames._

_Cain, breathing hard and coughing his lungs out on the stone steps leading up to the front door, is unaware of footsteps behind him until it is too late to run._

"_Well fought, Doctor," says a voice like an echo in a tomb._

_Cain turns and sees a small, skinny man in a trim white suit. Sunglasses cover his eyes and a white fedora covers much of his face, and straggly blonde hair hangs to his shoulders. He looks up and smiles at Cain through a trimmed beard._

"_I would not grow too confident, however. That shoggoth was one of many, and it will heal in time. And I..." And here the man throws his arms wide, as if to encompass the world. "I … am mightier still. Your powder will do nothing."_

_The Man in White, it should be pointed out, carries no weapon; no rifle, no knife, no pistol, no sword. He doesn't need them._

_Cain, even as he sees his death approaching, carries himself high._

"_So be it," he snaps. "Finish what you started, fiend. I shall not give you the satisfaction of my begging for my life."_

"_Very well," says the Man in White. "Would you prefer that I finished this quickly, or slowly?"_

"_Quickly,"_

"_Then it pleases me," says the Man in White with a smile, "To deny you your preference." With that, he takes off his sunglasses, revealing hell._

_Cain breaks his word and begs before the end. He then begs for death, which is granted in due course. After he is finished, the Man in White brushes imaginary specks of dust off his suit and regards the bookshop/inferno._

"_Hey-ho, another loose end goes," he croons, before he frowns and cocks his head to one side._

"_Peculiar," he says after a few moments. "What could the whelp want?" He shrugs, and steps into the void, leaving fire and Cain's body in his wake._

_Take note of this, if nothing else: The Man in White does not like loose ends._


	3. Exposition

Coraline stared at Miss Alhazred for a few uncertain moments.

_Is she just stringing me along? Does she really want to know? How could she know about the Beldam? What does she mean by "over my head?"_ Coraline struggled to marshal the thoughts thronging in her skull.

"What does it matter to you?" she snapped. Normally, she would have been more relaxed, but her nerves were jangling from the last few days of Derleth Middle School, and Miss Alhazred's questioning was bringing the bad memories of the summer back. Her anger needed a venting point, and Miss Alhazred had presented herself.

"Answer the question," responded Miss Alhazred, unfazed by Coraline's tone.

"You...," began Coraline, and then subsided.

And she told Miss Alhazred as much as she could remember, while Miss Alhazred took notes on a piece of scrap paper.

She told her about the other world, the other mother, the button eyes. She told her how she had discovered it one rainy day, and she told her about the creatures created by the other mother to amuse her, and she told her about the ghost children. She told her about the kidnapping of her parents, and the challenge Coraline had succeeded in to retrieve them and the ghost children's souls.

Miss Alhazred's eyebrows shot up at that part, but she said nothing. Coraline finished with how the other mother's hand had been destroyed at the well by herself and Wybie, and it and the key had been thrown into the well. As she was telling it, she realised that, whether or not Miss Alhazred believed any of it, it was a relief to simply vent, to tell someone about what had happened.

And as she finished, she realised that Miss Alhazred had not laughed or said "That's ridiculous," or smirked once. She had simply taken notes and acquired a deepening frown.

In the brief silence that followed, Miss Alhazred leaned back against her desk and scanned the notes she had taken, checking them against some internal check-list. Then she said "You mentioned Wybourne helped you destroy the hand?"

"He did," said Coraline, "And he prefers Wybie, just so you know. And he knows about all this as well."

"What class does he have?"

"Metal Shop, with Mr MacDonald." Coraline checked the clock and saw that it was half-an-hour into fourth period. Wybie must be wondering what was taking her so long.

Miss Alhazred reached around to the phone on the wall behind her, and asked Mr MacDonald to send up Wybie, claiming that he had forgotten some of the papers she had handed out.

Wybie materialised in the doorway a few minutes later, rummaging through his school-bag and muttering about how he was certain he picked up everything he was given, until Coraline interrupted him with a meaningful throat-clearing.

"Coraline told me about certain events over the summer that you were party to, Wybou...Wybie," said Miss Alhazred.

"Look," said Wybie, hurriedly, "If this is about the incident with the headteacher's car and the slug pellets, which I totally didn't know about until you mentioned it just now, then I'm innocent..."

"I told her about the other mother," said Coraline. "She seems to know more about it than we do."

"Regrettably, so I do," said Miss Alhazred in a dry manner. "Sit down, both of you, and I'll try to explain this as best I can. Ask me questions if you get confused, and trust me, you will."

Coraline and Wybie sat next to each other as Miss Alhazred shuffled through her notes.

"Okay," she began. "The creature that you encountered and fought was a Beldam."

"The ghost children mentioned that name," interrupted Coraline.

"A Beldam," pressed on Miss Alhazred, "Also known as an Arachpire, or a Hunter under Shadow. Their true forms, as far as humans can perceive, resemble giant spiders. They typically target children and the vulnerable, usually tempting them with gifts and improved versions of their normal lives. They drain their victims dry of life and energy if they're in contact for too long, and keep their souls for other purposes. They can alter worlds that they create freely, but must act through inanimate objects in this world. You know all this."

"Wait," said Coraline. "How do you know any of this? And what do you mean, "they?" Are you saying there's more like her?"

"I know all this because it's my job to know about things like this, and because other people have been kind enough to leave their writings and observations over the centuries. And yes, there is an entire species of them. Mercifully rare, but not rare enough."

The two children sat stunned, and Miss Alhazred elaborated. "We know that they breed. We know how they breed. And we know that others like it have been seen. There have been incidents in New York, Edinburgh, Johannesburg, all over the place. There was a particularly old and powerful one up at Derry, before your time. Probably the mother of the one you fought. And if you're curious, the souls it had taken would be used as eggs, and would have become little Beldams, given enough time."

"You...you mean that if I had failed, then..." said Coraline."

"You would have been the base for a new Beldam, warped and shifted over many centuries."

Coraline shivered. Wybie stayed silent.

"Hang on," he suddenly said. "I remember reading something about the one at Derry..."

"There were a lot of conflicting accounts, and it's not important. All you need to know is that the pair of you encountered one of these monsters, and defeated it on its own ground." A smile flickered at the ends of Miss Alhazred's mouth. "Which is no small feat, by all accounts."

"How do you know about these Beldams?" said Coraline, frowning. "These aren't the sorts of things you read about in textbooks or hear about in passing. Do you seek out and fight them?"

Miss Alhazred laughed; a dry, bitter laugh.

"Oh dear me," she chuckled. "Coraline, Beldams are the least of the things that I fight."

It could have been her imagination, but Coraline could swear a shadow passed over the room at that last sentence.

"What do you..."

"Put it this way. You know how Christianity and most other religions preach that humans were created by God, in God's image?"

"Sure."

"Imagine the sort of monster that could create the Beldams_,_" Miss Alhazred said.

Silence ruled the room for a few long moments, until Wybie said "Miss Alhazred, _why_ are you telling us any of this?"

"Because when you encountered the Beldam, you automatically became pawns in a game beyond your comprehension. You only met her once, but there's no turning back. The realms and entities like her will do their damnedest to find you, and if you're not prepared, they will _take_ you."

* * *

There is a place outwith what humans call reality, where the laws of physics hold no sway. Where thought becomes flesh, where flesh becomes thought, where the Great Old Ones hold their court on a black marble plaza.

_They_ were assembled there, beings created by cross-breeding nightmares, their forms shifting and blurring in the wind of unreality, regarding with abyssal eyes young Zoth-Ommog, who held the centre of the court.

Ithaqua the Wind Walker lurked at the side, his mad red eyes staring into nothing. Hastur settled into his position, Father Dagon and Mother Hydra nestled side by side in a grotesque parody of affection. Vushakon, Y'golonac, Cxaxukluth, Nyogtha, all the countless thousands of the Great Old Ones were there, presided over by the dream avatar of Dread Cthulhu.

Cthulhu began to speak, but it wouldn't have been recognised as speech by any but the most insane of certain astrophysicists. Eddies of space-time curled off across the cosmos as it stirred.

+_**Rise, child. Bring your matter before the Court**_.+

+Brothers and sisters,+ began Zoth-Ommog, +The matter I bring before the Unbidden Court concerns the discovery and defeat of one of my servants, a Beldam, by a human.+

+_beldams are weak creatures_.+ hissed Hastur. +_too human. too prideful. too given to arbitrary notions of games and fairness. be thankful it is gone_. _find a better minion to channel energy to you_+

+The Beldam was consumed for its failure, Lord Hastur, but the Beldam's defeat by a human was not strictly what I wanted to present to the Court. The issue is what that defeat represents.+

+_**Explain**_.+ said Cthulhu.

+The human that defeated my Beldam was a mere child. A child by the reckoning of its short-lived species. It, nearly single-handedly, outwitted and humiliated a being of the Outer Realms, and lived to tell the tale.+

+_let it tell tales_.+ snarled Hastur. +_what will they avail it? it will be ignored, dismissed as mad. humans have done anything rather than concede our existence. this has not changed_.+

+It may be changing, Lord.+

This got the attention of the Court. The Great Old Ones leaned (or lurched, or slithered, or floated) forwards.

+How many humans have we come into contact with recently?+ continued Zoth-Ommog. +How many of them have escaped and live to tell the tale about us, about our glories? We disregard them, but doing so only ignores the growing threat they pose. Father,+ and here it turned to Cthulhu, +One human ship, using no weaponry beyond a reinforced prow, was able to send you below the waves. You planned to reawaken that day, but the actions of one human crew denied you that.+

+_**I did not anticipate the actions of that ship.**_+ said Cthulhu. +_**But that does not...**_+

+We underestimate the power that humanity can bring to bear, and we underestimate their willingness to fight us should they discover us. Their ships are not the fragile galleons that once brought us tribute from the world over. They are now steel titans coated with guns and weaponry. I have seen the weapons of war humans possess. They have armoured engines bearing cannon, they have winged machines that can split the sky in their wake, they have missiles that can destroy cities...+

"That last one is my doing, I'm afraid. I had hoped for the weapons to enter more widespread use."

The Great Old Ones turned at this new voice, and shrank back in awe and terror. Cthulhu himself backed away from the unassuming figure of the Man in White.

After an echoing silence, Cthulhu's avatar knelt and whispered, +_**You honour us with your presence, Lord Nyarlathotep**_.+

"The honour is mine," said Nyarlathotep. "Rise, my servants. Do not fear your master's presence. I heard Zoth-Ommog's dilemma, and I can offer a solution."

+_a solution is not needed! the humans pose no..._+ Hastur's sudden courage wilted before the smile of Nyarlathotep.

"But why take risks, Hastur?" chuckled Nyarlathotep. "These missiles are very powerful, I made sure of that. Now as for your problem," he continued, turning to Zoth-Ommog, "The course of action seems obvious. Remove the loose ends. Eliminate the child and whoever else may have known about the events. Let the human authorities ascribe the deaths to murder or tragic accidents or what have you, and they shall be none the wiser. Merely apply the same rule to whatever actions you take on their world. Leave no evidence but the consequences."

+My...our ability to manifest in their world is limited, my lord,+ said Zoth-Ommog. +Our imprisonment amongst the stars in their reality makes it hard to...+

"Have you no cultists? No thralls?" said Nyarlathotep, arching a brow, a consciously human gesture. "No madmen who will throw their lives away at your command?"

+Not in that region, my lord.+

"Fine," tutted Nyarlathotep. "Then I shall deal with it myself. As I always do, and always shall." For the briefest of moments, the veneer of the Man in White cracked, and something else stared out. Something ancient, cruel, and easily amused. "Incidentally, Zoth-Ommog?"

+My lord?+

"Your fear seems to be that the humans will easily eliminate us if they discover us. Remember that we danced amongst the stars whilst they huddled under the dark. Remember that we held countless Courts while their ancestors fled from lizards. Remember that they are mere specks compared to the power that we can bring to bear. And remember that we can easily remind them of all that, should the need arise."

With that, the Man in White stepped into nothing, leaving the stirring Court behind him.


	4. Pieces Moving

Charlie Jones was sitting in his office, hammering at his computer, when he heard the door open.

He stretched and groaned, taking a moment to admire the computer. It was a hulking, grey-clad monstrosity, dominating most of the desk, with tiny fans that always seemed to be on the verge of exploding with sheer effort. When Mel had suggested they buy a new computer, he had said she should just get one for herself. The Monstrosity had served him faithfully since the mid 90s, and it would service him faithfully for decades to come.

Admittedly, it used an operating system that had no programmers or testers, on account of them all having died of old age, and the processor speed would be laughed at by a Neanderthal, but it was a good machine regardless.

He stepped up and away from it and into the kitchen, where Coraline was pouring herself a glass of water.

"Did you have a good day?" he inquired, reaching for the kettle and instant coffee.

"Yeah, it was alright," she said. "Is mom here?"

"She's out at the bank. Why?"

"I need a signature for this," she explained, drawing out a piece of paper from her school bag.

Charlie took the paper and scanned it, the kettle humming away to itself in the background.

"Blah blah blah permission blah blah child blah blah blah trip to Fort Adams?" His voice rose at the last part. "Isn't that all the way over in Rhode Island?"

"Yeah. Our class'll be taking a plane with some of the teachers and going to Newport. Apparently, they're restoring it, so its really historically accurate."

"Well, I'll see what what the boss says," said Charlie, putting down the paper, "But I think she'll say yes. This is something for History class, I take it?"

"Yes," lied Coraline.

* * *

Abra Alhazred sat at her desk in her apartment, her hand holding a pen aloft over a sheet of paper.

The old man in Rhode Island, upon being presented with a computer, had declared that it was a device of Nyarlathotep if ever he had seen one, and that he would be damned if he went anywhere near it. All communication, therefore, was carried out via the Postal Service.

_Dear Howard_, she began, _A situation has arisen over here that requires your attention. I intend to come over to Providence with a pair of children who have been exposed to Outer Realms influence..._

_

* * *

_

Wybie rode wildly down the muddy slope, swerving to avoid a tree, flipped over a rock cluster, and skidded on downwards, coming within sight of the Pink Palace. Slowing down, he putted up the driveway, stopping before the front door. He stepped off the motorbike, brushed himself down, straightened his helmet, and rang the bell.

Mel Jones opened the door, and started at the grinning skull mask before she realised who it was.

"Jesus...oh. Hello, Wybie. Are you here to see Coraline?"

"I am, Mrs Jones. Is she...?"

"Hey, Wybie!" came Coraline's voice from inside the house. "Wait a second!" She rounded a corner in the hallway, tugging on her swampers and coat.

"Are you going on the Fort Adams trip as well?" asked Mel, making conversation as the results of attempting to don footwear and overwear simultaneously unfolded in the hallway, and Coraline tripped over with a frustrated yell.

"Sure," said Wybie, who seemed distracted to Mel's eyes. "One of the English teachers, Miss Alhazred, will accompany the trip. She says it could inspire our creative writing."

"There," said Coraline with satisfaction, having pulled herself up and pulled on the swampers and coat. She reached out for and put on her hat, ready to go. "Where to, Wybie?"

"Just around and about, I thought. See you later, Mrs Jones," as the pair climbed onto Wybie's motorbike.

"Take care, you two. Come back before six," Mel called, as the motorbike sped off. She stood on the porch for a few minutes, watching them recede into the distance. Charlie wandered out and stood beside her.

The peaceful silence was broken first by Charlie.

"It's good that she's making friends here. He seems like a pretty nice kid."

"Yeah," said Mel. "She could do worse than him."

Meanwhile, Wybie's bike was doing a turn of speed that would have induced cardiac arrests in Mel and Charlie if they could see it.

"We need," screamed Coraline, above the roaring of the engine, while she held on like grim death to Wybie's shoulders, "To talk about what Miss Alhazred said!"

"What?"

"I said, we need to – _Look out for that hedgehog!_ - talk about what Miss...would you slow down?"

"Alright, alright," muttered Wybie, the motorbike puttering to a halt. "But I don't see what there is to talk about."

"What do you mean? She knows more about this than we do, and I want to know more. Don't you?"

"I don't know if she's being serious, that's the problem. And for all we know, she could be insane."

"What do you mean, "insane"? She told us all about the Beldam, which we fought. Remember that? The well, the hand that moved by itself, your near-death experience..."

"I'm not saying that didn't happen. I'm just saying that she might not be right about the other stuff. What she told us, about other Beldams, about these other gods, about other realms..." He sighed, and drew a hand through his hair. "I don't know, it's just a lot to take in. Give me time."

"We'll know more next week, when we go to Rhode Island. She said her friend there could tell us all about it." Coraline frowned. "How do you think she arranged that trip on such short notice anyway?"

"She must be very persuasive." Wybie started the motorbike. "Or be good at blackmail, or something. You want to go get ice cream?"

"Sure. If you're paying."

The motorbike sped off, sending the sound of their bickering and fallen leaves fluttering in its wake.

Unseen in a bush nearby, the cat sat still. He had heard all of their conversation, and he hadn't liked any of it.

* * *

The young man at the front desk in the Pontiac Housing Office had buried his head in a fat book.

A sharp ring from the bell on his desk broke his concentration, and he turned up to look at the man before his desk.

"How can I help you, sir?" he said.

"Good evening," said the Man in White. "There are certain people I wish to locate. I believe you could be of some assistance."


	5. Oncoming Storms

A week passed over Oregon, the days and nights flickering by like the pages of a book caught in a breeze.

Coraline paced restlessly from day to day, impatient to know more about whatever she had crossed paths with. Wybie seemed more laid back, but she knew that he hadn't had nearly the same amount of contact that she had had.

On the second day, there was a story in the _Ashland Daily Tidings_ about a particularly gruesome murder in Pontiac, where the receptionist for an office had been tortured to death late one night, when few other people had been in the building. Sheriff Bouchard (his son still owed Coraline a dollar) attributed the death to a robbery gone wrong.

On the third night, Coraline had a dream. She stood alone on an icy plateau, a blizzard shrieking around her and obscuring her vision. As she tried to press on through the snow, a tall shape slowly took form before her eyes, and as it became more distinct, a chilling whispering was carried on the wind.

Eventually she reached its base, and saw that it was a vast tower, wrought from smooth black-green marble, stabbing up into the wild night sky. No fault or crack showed upon its flawless surface, but as Coraline studied it and the whispering rose in volume, there seemed to be be a deep subtle _wrongness_ about the tower. It violated some unwritten rule of geometry, it soon began to hurt to even look at it.

But she could not look away, she could only stumble onwards, ignoring everything but the tower as the wind and snow howled and pain built up behind her eyes, and she could not look away as a small door in the base of the tower prised open.

And the silence that emerged from the door terrified her beyond words, scared her more than all the storms in the world. But she crouched down, and crawled into the nothingness revealed by the door...

She woke up shivering in the middle of the night, the dream mercifully ending at that moment.

On the fourth day, she told Miss Alhazred about the dream after class. Miss Alhazred stood as still as a statue, and then said, "That can be explained in Rhode Island as well. Now, here's what we have to do that day..."

On the fifth night, as Coraline met Mr Bobinsky coming down the stairs, he reported with some elation that he had elicited an _oompah-oompah_ from the mice manning the tubas.

"But is not all good news. The mice, they are a little, what is it, on edge? Jumping mice are a little jumpier than usual, eh? Very peculiar. Is not their mating season, they have no excuse."

On the seventh morning, which was unusually cold and gusty, Coraline said goodbye to her parents.

"Take care of yourself," said Mel, "And always do as the teachers tell you. Although I'm sure you do that anyway."

"Pay attention to everything. We'll test you later, to make sure."

"Da-_ad_."

Charlie smiled. "Here's something in case you feel like bringing back a souvenir," he said, reaching into his pocket for a five-dollar note. "You know, I hear they make really good beer in Newport...ow!"

"Have fun, honey," said Mel, contriving to look innocent as Charlie rubbed his arm. "Phone us once you get there, okay?"

"Will do. See you guys later," said Coraline, craning her head around at the sound of a familiar horn. Wybie had turned up on schedule with his motorbike, and waited at the bottom of the driveway.

Mel and Charlie watched her run down and clamber on, and returned her wave as the motorbike sped off. Mel turned to Charlie, a smile playing on her lips.

"Do you remember going on out-of-state trips when you were a kid?"

"Hardly," grinned Charlie. "Why, we just had to work hard all the time, thirty hours a day, and we walked twenty miles to school uphill both ways. In snow, no less. And..."

"Oh shush," said Mel. "She'll learn a lot while she's there."

Overhead, the first signs of an oncoming storm broiled, sending dark clouds skidding across the sky.

Weather has no proven ability to foreshadow, but that didn't stop the sky over Ashland.

* * *

The Man in White strode off the coach, with a spring in his step and a overwhelming urge to whistle.

He always enjoyed visiting places he had never been to before, and Ashland had hitherto been fortunate enough to avoid his presence. Indeed, the first he had ever heard of it had been from the young man in that office in Pontiac, who had said the Jones family had gone there.

Well, technically, he had said "Ashland, Ashland, that's all I remember, I swear to god, please don't hurt me again, aaaagh," but what was the use in quibbling? It was terribly ungrateful of the man to complain anyway. Most humans the Man in White had met would have given anything to go under a razor blade rather than his eyes.

The Man in White walked down the street the coach had parked in and ventured into Ashland itself.

He cast a critical eye over the buildings and scenery that flanked the roads as he walked. Pretty enough for human habitations, he supposed. They must have had some sort of festival recently, judging by the discarded and rotting bunting.

After two hours of walking, he bought some coffee from a street vendor of sorts, letting the appropriate human currency materialise in his hand as he made the transaction. He then sat on a bench, sipping at the steaming liquid as he let his gaze wander.

A pleasant little place, he thought. Not a patch on Kadath, of course, but what was?

While he was deep in remembrance, his eye alighted upon a section of bushes, a trash-can, an entrance to a broad expanse of green park, a few buildings jutting above the tree-line, another section of bush, a mangy black cat...

He stopped at the last one, and shot his head around to stare at the animal.

That animal, he thought, it seems a little...it couldn't possibly...a windfall...could it be...?

As if hearing his thoughts, the cat turned its head, and met his gaze with bright, sapphire-blue eyes. It jumped, as if struck by a bolt of lightning, span in mid-air, and accelerated down an alley.

Ah, thought the Man in White in triumph, after all this time, to discover him like this...

He tossed the coffee aside and sprang after the cat. He dived into the mouth of the alley and ran down it, keeping his eye on the small black blur some yards ahead of him. It reached a dead end, and sprang onto a bin, and then a low-hanging section of guttering, and scrabbled onto the roof and over the other side.

The Man in White stared, in amusement and contempt. He's spent so long in that body, he allows it to limit him, he thought, whereas I...

He stepped into the wall, and bent his will upon it. Reality buckled before him, and in one smooth , elegant, near-impossible-to-describe movement, he swept through to the other side and into another alley. He brushed himself down, spotting the cat lurking behind a cardboard box. He reached into his pocket, and produced a razor blade.

"Come on out, Ulthar," he said, holding the razor before him as if it were a duelling rapier. "You cannot conceal yourself from me. Come out and let us finish this."

There was no answer. Only the distorted shadow cast by the box revealed the cat's position, and it remained perfectly still.

"You aren't the type to cower in fear," the Man in White ventured. "Come out and face me, Ulthar, and cease disgracing yourself."

There was no answer from the box, and the Man in White lost patience. He threw the razor overarm at the box, and it sliced through to the other side and bounced off the wall.

The Man in White, puzzled, crept forward and brushed aside the box, revealing a bisected and much-abused teddy bear.

Hearing a noise to his right, he pivoted on his heel...

...to see the cat flying at him at eye height, eyes blazing and claws gleaming.

The Man in White span aside and, letting the razor leap into his palm, swept it up to meet the cat's throat. A claw met it with a mad skirl and a spray of sparks, and the Man in White's other fist rose to hammer into the cat's chest. The cat sprang back, avoiding the fist, and the Man in White stepped back.

For the briefest of moments, the two combatants held their ground, each warily watching the other.

Then the Man in White swept off his sunglasses, letting them clatter on the ground. Eyes as blue as a summer sky locked gazes with hell.

"Let's dispense with the pleasantries, shall we?" hissed the Man in White.

+Lets,+ retorted the cat, and both beings charged.

Anyone who looked into the alley in the next few moments would, after having been driven insane/dead/both, have seen a mad barrage of forms and shadows crashing into each other in the air of the alley.

One would have been a black cat, with eyes shining like jewels in the darkness, pouncing and lashing out with claw and tooth against the other form.

This would have been a skinny leaping thing that wielded a gleaming piece of metal, that was at some times a slender man in a white suit and fedora, and at other times...wasn't.

From moment to moment, almost at random, there would be a lull in the battle and the two would stalk one another, bleeding from dozens of cuts. And then, after a brief second of stillness, pandemonium would arise again.

And after the seventh one of these still moments in the fight, the Man in White won.

He caught a blow from the cat on the edge of his razor, and pressed forward, slashing its paw open to the bone. While it was caught off guard by this, he seized it by the tail and swung it into a wall, cracking it off the bricks. While the cat writhed from his grasp, he jammed the razor into its chest, and hurled it to the ground. He then met its weakened gaze with all the fury his hellish eyes could muster, and after a scant few seconds, the cat slumped back, defeated now and forever.

"Now, Ulthar," he said, "I desire information from you."

+You shall get nothing from me. I shall carry the knowledge you seek to my grave,+ spat the cat, resigned but still defiant in the face of the Man in White.

"No," snarled the Man in White. "You shall yield it to me, in time. You Elder Gods are as _nothing_ to the Outer Gods. I shall take the bindings you put on the Great Old Ones and undo them. You cannot stop me."

He then stopped, remembering something that now seemed trivial, but was the only reason he had ever encountered Ulthar. A thin reptilian smile slithered onto his face.

"By the by," he said, "There is someone I seek. One of the Great Old One's servants was defeated here recently, by a human. A child, no less." He laughed. "Trivial, I know, but I am obliged to remove the evidence, as it were." He bent down to the stricken Ulthar.

"I know you take delight in thwarting servants of the Great Old Ones. She must have had your assistance. Tell me about your role in the affair."

+You expect me to hand a human over to you? You're even more foolish than I thought.+

"Not willingly, no." Here, the Man in White thoughtfully tapped the razor blade against the tip of one index finger. "But herein is your problem. You assumed the role of imprisoning the Great Old Ones. You bound them amongst stars, and you swore to do your utmost to defend humans from them. But in doing so, you had to assume mortal characteristics. And now look at yourself. You are constrained by your form. You not only understand their morality, you follow it. You have bound yourself to humans, little by little, day by day, and now I suspect you are more mortal than god. That means you shall tell me what you know, as you must share their weaknesses."

+Your point?+

"_Look into my eyes, Ulthar._"


	6. The House at Providence

Mr Carlos stood before the huddling sixth graders, his scarf billowing in the wind. Behind him, Fort Adams nestled on the tip of land jutting into Narragansett Bay.

"Okay, class, remember what we talked about on Monday? Lance, what can you tell us about the building behind me?"

Lance O'Neil, who had "future high-school quarterback" written all over his powerful frame in big, red, easy-to-read crayon, assumed a pose of deepest contemplation that a Buddha would have envied.

"Anyone else?" tried Mr Carlos, after the pose had been maintained for a good few minutes.

"It's a fort, Mr Carlos," opined Fiona Whittaker, who had "future high-school queen bee" written all over her in cursive script. "Look, you can see the walls and everything."

"Wonderfully observed, Fiona," said Mr Carlos, resisting the urge to put "Captain Obvious" in place of her name. "But can anyone tell me about its function, or history, or...?"

"A fort in Newport, established in 1799 as a First System coastal fortification. First commanded by Captain John Henry who was later instrumental in..." began Mickey Rickman.

"I can see the palmtop, Mickey. Can no one...?"

As he tried to instil some knowledge into the class' heads, Mr Carlos wished Miss Alhazred was present. Unfortunately, she had had to take away the Lovat boy and the Jones girl, who had both acquired stomach pains.

This could charitably be described as an untruth on Miss Alhazred's part, who was currently driving along the motorway leading north to Providence in a hired car. Coraline and Wybie were settled in the back seat, both devoid of any stomach pain.

The flight yesterday had been a rough one, the winds buffeting the plane constantly. The class had arrived in Rhode Island at night, and were greeted by a rainstorm as they emerged from the plane, which didn't let up until early the next morning. They had stayed in rooms booked in a hotel for the night, with the tour of Fort Adams planned to take up the morning and all of the afternoon. After that, an evening flight would return the class to Oregon.

In the meantime, Coraline and Wybie required some answers.

"How much further?" asked Wybie, scratching at his neck.

"Not far. About fifteen miles," said Miss Alhazred, keeping her eyes on the road.

That had been the most conversation they'd had since leaving Newport.

"So," said Coraline, after a few minutes more silence, "Who is it we're going to see, exactly?"

"You could call him an expert in these matters. He's very old, he's had a lot of first hand experience, and he's interested in your case." She turned slightly, looking at them side-on. "It's for the best if you get it all from him, however. His history's pretty unique." With that she turned back to the road.

* * *

Charlie Jones was making his eleventh cup of coffee of the day when he heard a knock at the door.

"Hold on, hold on," he said, midway through pouring the boiling water into the cup. "I'll get it, Mel!"

There came a muffled "Okay." from the closed study door, where Mel, possessing more technical expertise than Charlie, was sorting out a problem with the Monstrosity.

Charlie walked to the front door and opened it, revealing a smiling man dressed in a white suit and fedora, as well as, rather incongruously on the cloudy day outside, a pair of sunglasses. He had a satchel slung over his left shoulder, containing something bulky by the looks of it.

"Good morning, Mr Jones," said the man. "May I come in?"

"Are you a Jehovah's Witness?" asked Charlie, presuming that the hands clasped behind his back held a stack of pamphlets. "Because I've already told your colleagues in Pontiac, I'm perfectly comfortable with..."

"No, Mr Jones," said the man with a chuckle. "No, I don't believe I can claim to represent that organisation in any way, shape, or form." His accent, Charlie noticed, wasn't settled, it seemed to flit across the North American continent and settled wherever it fancied for a given word.

Something clicked for Charlie.

"How do you know who I am? And who are you?"

"I have my resources," said the man with a shrug. "And I, Mr Jones, represent this group."

He produced a leaflet he had found in the street and held it below Charlie's face. Charlie automatically looked down to it, and said "What, you represent Senator Wyden's re-election campaign...?" and stopped. Something sharp and cold was pressed against his Adam's apple.

"Please back slowly into the kitchen and sit down, Mr Jones," said the Man in White. "Don't speak, cry for help, try to reason with me, or inform me where your money is. I only want your silence."

Charlie stood stunned, until gentle pressure by the blade pressed him back into the kitchen. The Man in White pressed him into one of the seats, motioned for him to stay put, and rummaged in a drawer until he located some duct tape. He tossed the satchel into a corner and wound the duct tape around Charlie several times until he was satisfied. He stepped back, spinning the razor blade around one finger.

"Call for your wife, Mr Jones."

"The hell I will."

"If you do not get her, I shall," and here the razor blade span into the fork of two fingers and was held still. "And I may damage her in the process. Call her in, Mr Jones."

Charlie coughed weakly, his mind ablaze with panic and anger, and called out "Mel? Mel? There's something in the kitchen that needs your attention."

This elicited a frustrated sigh from the study, and a cry of "Charlie, if you've tried cooking bacon in the toaster again, then I swear to god, I'll..."

"No, it's not that. Please come, Mel."

Something in his voice must have grabbed her attention, for she then poked her head around the corner, and gasped when she saw the Man in White holding a razor against her husband's throat.

"Take a seat, Mrs Jones," said the Man In White. "And if you try to flee, or alert your neighbours, or contact the police, or attack me with a bread-knife or whatever you may be planning, then I shall kill your husband."

Mel slowly took a seat, and the Man in White taped her to the chair.

"There," he said once he'd finished, "Now we can have a hopefully illuminating conversation."

"Look," said Mel, "On the dresser in our bedroom upstairs, there's a purse with our..."

"I'm not interested in your money, Mrs Jones. Nor am I interested in any precious items or electronic appliances you may care to offer. I would, however, appreciate information regarding your daughter's activities over the summer."

"What?" said Charlie, and Mel followed up with "Why the hell do you..."

"Explanations are luxuries, Mr and Mrs Jones, and I'm not inclined to give you one at present." He pointed the razor at the clock over the oven. "Time is ticking. I desire answers."

* * *

Providence arose on the horizon, and crept closer along the motorway.

They entered the city, weaving through the streets and navigating knots of pedestrians and traffic.

"Bloody student drivers," muttered Miss Alhazred after a particularly irksome knot. "By the way, you two, the gentleman we are on our way to shares his home with a number of other men."

After a few silent minutes and exchanged looks between her and Wybie, Coraline began, "Well, okay. Whatever he does in his personal life isn't any of our busi..."

"No! No. Well, maybe. Look, I mean, he regularly plays host to members of the organisation we are a part of, and a number of them have taken up a semi-permanent residence. I tell you this as they may have additional insight into your situation."

They navigated their way to the north end of Providence, and finally slowed before a particularly large house near the outermost tip.

It was an impressive structure, built three stories high out of white brick. The few windows were large, with blinds pulled shut behind them. A white stone porch jutted out the front, on which was a large, well worn (if rather damp) sofa, topped with a towering (and disintegrating) stack of newspapers. Flowers bloomed in the front garden, the green, glistening sides of which rolled around the house. The whole thing was raised atop a small hillock, with a gravel path curling from the driveway up to the porch.

Miss Alhazred drove the car up the driveway and parked it before the closed garage door. She got out, beckoning Coraline and Wybie to follow her up the path. As they neared the porch, the door within opened, and a diminuitive, white-whiskered old man walked out with the aid of a cane.

"Hello, Abra," he said with a gummy grin. "Didn't know you were coming. You planning on staying long?"

"Hello, Titus," she said, bending down to give him a peck on the cheek. "I'm just up for today. Did Howard not tell you we were...?"

"Heh, he's about as communicative as a wall these days." He noticed Coraline and Wybie standing behind Miss Alhazred. "Who're them two?"

"First-contactees."

"Ah," he said, nodding sagely. "You get them inside, then. Catch up with you later."

"See you, Titus," Miss Alhazred said, entering the house and trailing Coraline and Wybie behind her.

Titus wasn't the only one in the house at Providence. There were others, glimpsed behind half-closed doors as Miss Alhazred led Coraline and Wybie through the house. Many of them were elderly men, dressed in old-fashioned suits and casting glances at Alhazred's entourage as they passed through.

Most of them were in groups of three or four, chatting or playing cards or chess around tables. Some sat before huge old gramophones, others sat alone, or stared into space at some unknown horizon.

There were others in the house as well. As they moved up a flight of stairs, Coraline saw a decrepit old man sitting alone on a bench at the top of the stairs, paying nothing any heed beyond the violin in his grip, from which he was producing a beautiful tune. Moving through the first floor's corridors, Wybie bumped into a elderly albino woman, who gave him a shy smile and moved on. They passed by groups of younger people, who only had a few grey hairs as opposed to a multitude of them. They seemed to be an even mix of genders, these latest groups, and seemed to be drawn from around the world.

Coraline even thought she saw one that bore a more than passing resemblance to a fish, but she felt it best not to comment.

The people all but vanished by the time they reached the third floor, and the rooms there seemed to be used as storage rather than living quarters. One door left open revealed a dusty antique clock, a massive old elephant gun, a radio atop a wooden glass-fronted container of preserved creatures in jars, and dozens of other bizarre items.

They finally reached the last door, a heavy oak specimen from which muffled voices, raised in argument, could be heard. Miss Alhazred rapped on the door, and a voice commanded "Come in."

The group entered the room. At the far end, there was a large oak desk covered in scattered newspapers and sheets of figures. Two old men, one sitting behind it and the other standing before it, turned at their entry

"Good afternoon, Abra," said the one before the desk. "I was just leaving, if you're here to speak with..." and here he shot a sour look at the man behind the desk.

"I am, Danforth. But I'll be sure to speak with you later."

"You shall," he said as he swept out the room, pausing only to slam the door closed.

The man behind the desk sighed, running his hands through his grey hair.

"I wouldn't have thought time could make Danforth any more irrational. Apparently, I was wrong," he muttered, then looked up, a smile on his face.

"It's a pleasure to see you again, my dear. How's Oregon faring?"

"Still intact. It's good to see you as well, Howard. They're the children I wrote to you about,"she said, turning and gesturing at Coraline and Wybie.

"Very good. Come closer, you two, I promise I won't bite." Coraline and Wybie shuffled closer, and the old man stood up to extend a hand. He combined height with skinniness, with intelligent brown eyes staring out of a long, thin face. His face was topped and based upon silver crops of hair, and he shook Coraline's and Wybie's hands with surprising force.

"Abra told me about you and your situation. You must be Caroline...beg pardon, Coraline Jones, correct?" he said, endearing himself to Coraline almost immediately. "And you must be Wybourne Lovat. I am pleased to meet you both. I believe I can shed some light on the matter of the Beldam you both fought. To do that, however, I must tell you about myself, the organisation I have created, and the purposes of said organisation. Take a seat from the side, it will be a long tale."

"Excuse me," said Coraline, "I'm grateful that you want to help us, but who are you? You know our names, but we don't know yours. I'd like to start this on equal ground."

"Ah, of course. How rude of me." The old man hesitated for a minute, then spoke. "I changed my name at one point during my life, for reasons I shall soon go into, and it is the name I present to the outside world. But I shall trust you with the name I was born with, and the name that the organisation's members give to me. My name in full is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Does that ring any bells?"

"Not really."

"Excellent. Then I shall get started. And please, call me Howard."


	7. Days Dark and Distant

"Before I start my account," began Howard, "Let me have your assurances that you will not interrupt me or ask questions while I speak. The narrative is long and sinister, and it is not something I am inclined to repeat too often or dwell too long upon. In any case, any questions you may have will be answered by listening. Any that aren't must be reserved until I am finished."

"Let me begin with my own life and experiences, as it is the instigator of all that was to come."

"I was born in the August of 1890, making me nearly a good round hundred-and-twenty years old. A not exceptional age attained for those who have encountered the Outer Realms, and especially not for those with as much contact as I. I was the son of a travelling salesman of precious minerals, and my mother was of prosperous merchant stock, being the daughter of the powerful industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. I was raised surrounded by and upon books, as I lacked a father in my childhood. My father, when I was three, suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the last five years of his life paralysed and comatose."

"My aunts and mother attended to my moral education, whilst my grandfather, in spite of his coarse mercantilism, delighted in literature and encouraged me in its study. Fiction was my constant playmate; by day I walked through magical Arabian deserts, and by night I sailed the Aegean Sea with Odysseus and Jason. I think I must have indulged in those works so voraciously as a unconscious defence against the horrors that assailed my mind even then."

"You see, my dreams, even then, consisted of horrors beyond anything endurable by a healthy human mind. Terrors between stars blasphemed at my mind, dwellers of stygian depths laughed at my naivity even as I gazed upon them. And I saw them, by all means, I saw them all. No fear was left unassailed, no corner of my mind was left untarnished by the things in my dreams. And being very young, I thought them to be mere night terrors, and I was prescribed useless medication."

"My school attendance was infrequent on account of these dreams, for I was a nervous, irritable, lonely child, and I chafed under the yoke of education. I delved deeper into literature, and I developed an interest in astronomy. The stars intrigued me, in spite of the monsters my dreams told me dwelt amongst them, for they were beautiful and mysterious both, and I was determined to learn more about them. It was that desire that sustained me throughout my adolescence, when things took a turn for the worst amongst my family."

"My father's death when I was eight was no great shock and no great concern to me, for I had hardly known the man. My mother, however, was devastated by it, and I became her emotional crutch in the years to come. The situation was made even worse when my grandfather died when I was fourteen, and for a time she was but a shell of her former self. More dramatically, his death imposed severe financial difficulties upon us and we were forced to move to poorer quality housing. Because of this, when I started attending high school, I drove myself into my studies with an unprecedented energy and passion. I was determined, you see, determined to not only become an astronomer, but to also become as successful an astronomer as my grandfather was an industrialist, and to support my family."

"But the demons in my dreams had other plans. They started recurring more and more frequently, and I even suffered hallucinations of them during waking hours. Finally, before my final exams, I collapsed into a nervous breakdown that lasted long enough to deny my leaving high school with a diploma. I was furious and helpless both, and humiliated at the prospect of suffering at the hands of beings that, as far I was concerned, only existed in my imagination. The final stinging blow was delivered when I was denied the chance to enter Brown University. My dreams of becoming an astronomer were shattered, and it seemed to me that there was nothing for me left in the world."

"From 1908 to 1913, however, in the midst of my hermitage, I was not entirely idle. For you see, I had come upon a means of soothing the horrors my mind threw at me. Writing. The art of penmanship gave me some respite, and inspired by this, I investigated the prospects of writing as a career. I developed my writing skills, honing myself on the style of the great Gothic novelists and using as inspiration the terrors of my dreams. Finally, my opportunity to break into literature came in 1913, when I submitted a letter to one of the leading pulp magazines of the day, a letter that drew much comment and excited the interest of the President of the United Amateur Press Association, who invited me to join his organisation. I eagerly accepted."

"I soon began a flow of fiction into the amateur world, noting that my most admired tales were those that were drawn from my dreams. Perhaps people simply recognised a greater realism in them than my other work, or were simply intrigued by the prospect of nameless tentacled horrors. I made many contacts and friends, some of whom would later become involved in my literary efforts. My mother's death in 1921, although devastating to me at the time, liberated me fully and gave me full access to the world of pulp fiction. Indeed, it was only a few weeks after her death that I met my future wife at a journalism convention."

"Her name was Sofia Greene, and she was a Russian Jew in an era when such qualities were despised by most of society, even by myself. But in spite of my bigotry at the time, I was enamoured with her regardless, and she returned my feelings. We married in 1924, and informed my aunts by letter. We moved to her apartment in Brooklyn, and the first few years of our marriage, we were a happy couple."

"Despite her company, I could never grow to love New York. For one thing, in those distant days I was an irredeemable bigot, and the streets of Brooklyn were packed with immigrants, foreigners, lower classes, and others I personally found repulsive. It scared and revolted me in equal measures, and once again, my stories became a form of escapism from a world I despised."

"My growing anxiety and financial cares started to split myself and Sofia apart, and we finally divorced in 1929. To this day, I curse myself for that, which arose because of my ignorance and inability to accept the multiculturalism of New York."

"My writing continued to flow in that time, and nearly all of my stories dealt with my nightmares' contents. I became steadily more well-known, and I made many friends who were intrigued by my devised mythos. August Derleth, young Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard. Good acquaintances all, and I put forth and accumulated a large quantity of correspondence. They all seemed eager to contribute their stories to my mythos, and I let them. Their creations bore little resemblance to those in my dreams, but they all picked up on a common theme of overwhelming and unstoppable cosmic horror. The genre took off, thanks largely to my efforts."

"As time marched, I matured. I still lamented the foolishness that had lost me Sofia, and I began genuine efforts to tolerate different races and peoples. I encouraged young writers in their craft, and I even took an interest in politics. I supported Roosevelt, and his economic and social reforms which, although not too dramatic as far as your generation is concerned, were positively socialistic for their time. I also learned as much about the world as my relatively impoverished conditions allowed, taking in information about nearly every subject under the sun. By the time my life as H. P. Lovecraft neared its end, I was no longer the arrogant young racialist that had strode out of Providence."

"I began to suffer from cancer of the intestine and Bright's Disease, both of which promised an protracted, painful death. My poverty was exacerbated by the Great Depression, and by March of 1937, I lay near death's door in a hospital in Rhode Island. My nightmares and daytime visitations of unnatural horrors increased tenfold, overwhelming me in body and soul."

"And as dark nights for me passed, one by one, coated in absolute agony, I had one, all-powerful, life-changing epiphany. The dreams I suffered from were not mere figments of the imagination. _They were real. _They were prophetic and oracular visions of the abominations that dwell beyond the fringes of reality."

"My dreams had always seemed especially lucid, and the events in them that I recounted in my stories had parallels in this world. Confirming this, the night I arrived in hospital, I dreamed of a man alone in the Appalachians, who stumbled upon a nest of servants of the Great Old Ones. His last moments were relayed to me in perfect clarity, as he stumbled, half-mad and desperate, through darkened woods, hearing nothing but his thundering heart and the inexorable steps of the nameless horrors behind him. And sure enough, the next day's newspaper contained an account of a horrible death in the Appalachians, attributed to bears."

"Over the years, I had noticed other accounts in the press identical to my dreams, but I had pushed them away as coincidences only. But in that moment of perfect, horrible clarity, I realised the truth."

"And these mad alien gods, these violators of all natural laws, they existed on a scale beyond our comprehension. We were but mice making merry while the cat was away, helpless before them and their infinite power. They had danced on the Earth when the stars were young, and they would return when the stars were right. And they had noticed my scribing, and they had influenced my demise from afar, exacerbating the waste inside my body and working towards my death."

"All my old preconceptions were stripped away in that moment. Whatever the differences between men, we were all ultimately brothers on a floating speck of dirt in the black infinity of the cosmos. Whatever our skin colour, or upbringing, or creed, we had lived, struggled, hoped and breathed together on this lonely island we call Earth. And we would surely die together, when the Outer Gods and their servants, the Great Old Ones, awoke."

"But in that same moment of clarity, when I realised the full scale of the inevitable doom for humanity, of our sheer insignificance compared to these horrors amongst the stars...I was determined to _fight_ them."

"We may have been but specks compared to them, but we were possessed of life and love and hope and all those things most valuable in the unfeeling universe, and I was resolved to defend these at any cost. Furthermore, these alien gods desired my death, and for that alone I was determined to spite them, to show that they would not enjoy the same control over humanity that they had in the past. Rebellion against destiny seemed to me the noblest choice, as opposed to rotting in that hospital bed."

"And I fled that night, that stormy night of March the tenth. I fled into the city, my hospital gown flapping around my heels, while orderlies ran like headless chickens. The cancers that ate away my bowels were now working alone against an unnatural vitality, gifted to me by my long contact with the Outer Realms, with the influence of the dark gods driven away by my recast will. I fled, and survived, and I took the name of Domnall MacLeister, so as to avoid detection by the cultists serving the powers of the Outer Realms."

"My remaining aunt, certain that I must be dead out on the streets, arranged for a funeral to proceed. The few that attended were unaware that there was no body in the casket. I, meanwhile, was hiding amongst the poorest and most run down sections of Providence, and I took a train to New York as soon as I could. I once again lived in the poorest sections, rubbing shoulders with all those people I had once despised. It was an education for me, as I shrugged off the last remnants of my old bigotry and learned to live amongst them, laugh with them, became embroiled in their culture and families and hopes for the future. It was also the place where I got a job in a greengrocers, supporting myself by stacking shelves, and spending much of my money on courses in medicine at a nearby college. I worked for cents, but I only intended to do this for a short while. You see, I had seen the ways the winds of the world were blowing. I had seen an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany, an imperialistic Japan, and the gradual division of the world into two armed camps, just as it had done two decades before."

"When America entered the Second World War in December of 1941, I was ready, and I signed up for the army. I was commissioned as a combat medic, and I and my unit saw action in Normandy and throughout France and Germany. I saw more blood and devastation and inhumanity towards one's fellow man in those years of war than I ever had in my life. It is not a subject I wish to talk more of."

"In any case, the G. I. Bill, brought into being by the redoubtable Roosevelt, offered me and many other returning soldiers college or vocational education. I had planned to study economics and I did so. Wall Street was a whole new world that I had to deal with, and I went into investment banking. I made a few lucky decisions, and a few sound investments, and within a few years I had ended up with a sizeable sum of money. Thus far, everything had gone according to plan."

"With my new resources, I began touring America, determined to discover the humans in my dreams. If my dreams were truly real, then that meant that there must be a veritable legion of shattered old men in asylums across the nation, I was determined to find them, and I did so, touring across America throughout the 1950s. I met many of these men, most of them sustained by the same vitality given to me, and I explained the situation as best I could to them."

"I recognised all the men I met, for I had seen them all in my dreams. They had been broken by the Outer Realms, these men, these professors and students and cultists and free-thinkers, and they grabbed eagerly at the hope of fighting back that I presented. One by one, I gathered them to me, and we formed a new order."

"Henry Armitage was the first man I met, a obsessed and fiercely intelligent librarian at Miskatonic University. He directed me to others, and he shared with me what he had learned of the dark powers. Then came Amni Pierce, and Inspector Legrasse, and Daniel Cain, and many more. I met Lavinia Whateley in a bar in Boston by chance. Poor dear – she had been impregnated by one of the horrors in her history, and I cannot imagine a more ghastly happening. Everyone I met seemed to regard me as a kind of prophet, for I brought them contact with others who had shared their experiences, and I gave them hope of a brighter future."

"By 1962, I had gathered to me nearly everyone there was on the continent, and we established zones under our watchful eye that we sought to purge of eldritch influence. We were more resilient to them than the common man, and I armed our group with knowledge of the creatures we faced. Armitage supplied us with his stockpiles of a dangerous-to-obtain and marvellous and rare substance, sand from the beaches of distant Kadath, which was caustic to the things we fought. Slowly, ever so slowly, we undermined their cults and cut them off whenever they enroached upon our world, all the while remaining hidden and unseeable to the creatures."

"But I knew that those efforts alone would not be enough. They hardly restricted themselves to America, and I knew that I had to discover others who had come into contact with the Outer Realms. I set off with a few of my best and brightest, leaving the rest to hold the fort in America, and we travelled the world for many years, through the Orient, across Eurasia and Africa and South America. I guided us to our recruits with the oracular influence of my dreams, but it was not recruits that I was only after."

"You see, in the Dark Ages, in the depths of Araby, there was a man called Abdul Alhazred. He, I believed, suffered from the same condition as I, only more pronounced. The poor man was driven quite mad by it all, and he and I were alike in that we turned to writing to aid us."

"But our conditions were different. I, mercifully, am limited to their actions in this world, and the influences and cults that spring up around them. But Alhazred saw _everything_. He saw the gods themselves nightly, saw their essence and soul in all his nightmares, and knew all there was to know about them. And he wrote perhaps the most important and unreadable book that has ever been in this world; the _Necronomicon_. This book contained all knowledge of the Outer Realms, including, I hoped, how to destroy them."

"And one dark night in 1980, under the shadow of the Asir Mountains, I discovered Alhazred's last living descendants. An old man, an older woman, and their infant granddaughter Abra clenched in their arms. They possessed a copy of the _Necronomicon_."

"When I told the old couple who I was, they were astounded by my ambition. They had lived in the shadows cast by their ancestor all their lives, and they considered their position unchangeable. But some spark of my confidence must have rubbed off on them, for they pleaded with me to take little Abra with me when I left, for they hoped that I could give her the skills to face down and defeat the Outer Gods, and believed I could offer her a better quality of life in America than they could. If I took Abra into my care, they said, I could have their copy of the _Necronomicon_. I accepted, and when I returned to America I took pains to ensure that she was raised by a wonderful and caring couple, whom I personally knew and who would make sure she grew up knowing about her heritage."

"My study of the _Necronomicon_, however, was hindered by one major problem. I deduced from the old couple in Arabia, as well as from old records and my own dreaming, that reading the _Necronomicon_ would push even the most jaded and knowledgeable minds into the depths of merciful madness. No one in history barring Alhazred himself had ever read the entire thing, and even I can only study the briefest fragments before I withdraw out of sheer self-defence. But what little I have learned has been enough to answer many of my questions."

"The beings we fight are divided into three categories. First, we have the lesser species, who act as servants of the higher powers and are mindless and able to be fought for the most part, although still terrifyingly powerful and horrific by any human standards. Such creatures include the shoggoths, nightgaunts, dimensional shamblers, and , of course, your Beldams."

"Secondly, we have the Great Old Ones. They are many, and they are cruel, and they are powerful on a scale beyond our reckoning. They are, mercifully, bound to specific regions, whether that be stars, or the bottoms of oceans, or forgotten cities, and as such their influence is limited. But they are mighty still, and it will be a black day for humanity should they ever become free. The greatest of them is Cthulhu, The Sleeping God, who serves as the high priest to the most powerful of all the beings of the Outer Realms."

"The Outer Gods. They are not things easy to express in words, save that they are infinitely cruel, powerful, and ancient beyond reckoning. They serve as beacons of chaos amidst the dark sanity of the universe, icons of unassailable cosmic principles. We have Azathoth, the blind, mindless, nuclear chaos at the heart of all infinity and reality. There is also Yog-Sothoth, the perhaps most powerful of them all, congruous with all Space and all Time. And Nyarlathotep, the most dangerous and cunning of the Outer Gods. He interferes regularly with humanity, but not as an agent of destruction, He merely takes pleasure in poking at humanity and watching it squirm like a colony of frantic ants. He has done so and does so in countless forms. A pharaoh, a demon, a skinless horror, a man dressed in white, he has taken all of these forms, usually from their original owners."

"That, children, is what the organisation fights. That is what we contest against on a daily basis. We gaze into the abyss every moment of our lives, and the least we must do is give it a damn good poke in the eye when it gazes back. It has been over a half a century since the organisation took form, and we have kept our vigil. But we have had our setbacks, and our untimely deaths. Armitage was killed in a gunfight with cultists of Shub-Niggurath. William Dyer fell fighting a shoggoth in Argentina, making sure to take it down with him. Daniel Cain was recently found dead in Red Hook. All were losses we could scarce afford, and we have lost others to madness and old age besides."

"That is why I was eager to meet you when Abra wrote of you to me, asking for my assistance. We have few victories, and those we have are unseen, often undone, and forgotten as new problems rise. In these dark days, your triumph over a servant of the Outer Realms has given me renewed hope for the future and for mankind's ability to face down the Outer Gods and Great Old Ones."

"You have given me a great gift, and for that I pledge to you my assistance, and any answers you may still need."

* * *

"Listen, buddy," spat Charlie, beating Mel to the punch, "I don't know who you are, or why you want that information, but if you believe that we'll tell you a single fucking thing about our daughter, then you..."

The Man in White suddenly brought the bright steel razor in his hand across Charlie's face with a _snap, _slashing his face open to the bone and eliciting a gasp of shock and pain from Charlie. Mel cried out in horror and outrage, and the Man in White bent down and stared into Charlie, meeting him face to face.

Charlie, looking up, met the Man in White's eyes, and wished he hadn't.

Despite the obscuring effects of the sunglasses, the sheer force of the eyes behind them hit Charlie like a battering ram. When he stared into the smoky lenses, the abyss stared back and found him wanting.

These eyes had witnessed the erection of pyramids, had watched legions of workers crushed and baked by the construction and sun of ancient pre-Egypt.

These eyes had seen the sack of Rome, had watched civilians massacred and butchered and raped and had watched their bodies piled to the rooftops, and the bearer had been satisfied that his underlings had been obedient.

These eyes had seen the paper that Einstein had held, had inspired him to deduce a certain equation, and had watched the clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki with great amusement.

These eyes had seen every atrocity known to humanity, for the bearer had committed most of them.

These eyes carried infinity with them, and they bored into Charlie's soul, the void reflected in them a thousand times over.

"Mr Jones," hissed Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the Nemesis of Humanity, "Do you persist in the belief that you pose any obstacle to me _whatsoever_?"


	8. Nemesis

In the silence that followed his tale, Howard leant back in his chair and faced Coraline and Wybie across the table.

Coraline's mind was afire with uncertainty and a thousand questions, from which she was trying to pick out the most important ones. If all that she had just heard was true, then...then what did this mean for the world? How could creatures like the ones described in the tale have escaped detection? What was she going to do?

Glancing at Wybie, she saw the same confusion and terror that was on her face. She half-wished she had a bulky coat to huddle into as well.

"You said you studied medicine at college before World War Two," she finally managed, playing for time with a simple question. "How did you afford the fees on your salary?"

"Ah, a difficult one. I'm sorry to admit that I engaged in petty larceny at this time, although I was always sure to take only from those who could afford it. I also found the time for the courses by taking night classes, for my unnatural vitality reduces my need to sleep considerably."

"I have a question," said Wybie, for which Coraline gave silent thanks, "When you fight these things...well, how do you fight them? If they're as powerful as you say they are, and you can't find out how to destroy them, what do you do?"

"A great many of the Great Old Ones, all of whom are bound and can't directly walk this earth, have a great many cults in the world who do their dark bidding. Desperate or maddened or merely bored individuals who take up worship presumably in the hopes of gaining power, or maybe just for the hope of a quicker death when the Great Old Ones rise. We strike at these cults, depriving them of members and framing or dealing with the leaders, and thus cutting off their heads. If we can, we also remove the artifacts or documents that inspired them, and from time to time, should we come across a particularly capable and remorseful cultist, they may be brought into the order. But should intelligent methods not work or be impossible to try, then we simply bribe local police to turn a blind eye and go in guns blazing. In the case of minor Outer Realms creatures, a single operative with a few grains of Kadath sand is usually sufficient to deal with it."

"Where is Kadath anyway?"

"A long way away." And that was all he said about it.

Coraline took a breath, having summoned the most pertinent and personally important question that came to mind.

"Mr Lovecraft, I appreciate that you thought it was important that I...we know about all this. I'm grateful for knowing more about the Beldams, and where they come from, and everything. I also realise that you might want to thank us for defeating her on her own ground. But, and this is a big but, why did you choose to tell us about all this? It seems like the sort of knowledge that could be dangerous, and I don't know how much I want to be mixed up in all this. If you were happy at our victory, why not just smile from afar and leave us to the rest of our lives? Why drag us all the way out to Rhode Island to teach us this sort of stuff?"

In the silence that followed, it seemed to Coraline that she could hear distant whispering, the same whispering that she had heard in her dream about the tower.

"It's a fair question," said Howard after a while, "and it deserves a fair answer. You're right, Coraline, this is dangerous knowledge, and you will come to regret knowing all of this. But the fact of the matter is...well, one moment of contact with the Outer Realms is one moment too many. You have crossed an event horizon, and for that you shall be hunted by creatures beyond your darkest nightmares, whether you know of them or not. But now you do know of them, and you know of the order."

After another, chillier pause, Coraline asked "So what do I now do?"

"For the meantime, just go about your normal routine in Oregon. If we're lucky, we'll have some time before they actively start hunting you. Should you witness anything unusual or disturbing, inform Abra immediately. When they come, we'll be ready, I promise you."

Miss Alhazred, who had sat at the side reading a leather-bound book throughout the conversation, closed her book and cleared her throat.

"We'll have to leave soon if we want to catch the flight back, children. Howard, thank you for meeting us."

"My pleasure, my dear. And, er..." He coughed as Coraline and Wybie got out of their seats, and they turned to him.

"I urge you two to look out for yourselves," he said, "But you may have to keep a watchful eye on your families and loved ones as well. The beings of the Outer Realms can be … indiscriminate in their retribution."

* * *

"I will tolerate no more resistance on your parts," said the Man in White, running one nail across the length of the bloody razor. "Let me outline how this will proceed."

Charlie, his face awash with blood, and Mel, her face drawn and pale, sat silently.

"I will ask you a series of simple questions. If I do not receive an answer, I will hurt one of you at random. If I suspect one of you is lying, I will hurt the other one. If I should discover later that you have told me a lie, I will hurt your daughter. Do you understand me?"

When he was met with silence, the Man in White dashed a fist into Mel's throat, and snapped "Do you _understand_?"

Charlie cried "Yes, for the love of god!" while Mel choked, a bruise raised on her windpipe.

"Good." The Man in White leaned back against a counter, playing with the razor. "Let's start at the beginning. You left Pontiac to move to Ashland. Why?"

"We..." wheezed Mel, fighting for breath, "We both lost our jobs at the same time. We...we had been writers for a gardening magazine which went bust. We thought about...moving to Boston but we were contacted by a gardening company based in Ashland. They offered us jobs writing their catalogues. We moved to Ashland...while writing the one they had commissioned from us."

"Ah. And you brought your daughter with you."

"Well, of course. But she wasn't happy about the move. None of us really were, but she took...it particularly badly."

"I can imagine. And so, with her parents fretting over a catalogue, how did your daughter fill an empty summer?"

"She explored," said Charlie, giving Mel time to rest her throat. "She's always explored, since she was a toddler. She had the run of all the country round about us while we got settled in. She met a boy, the son of the landlady. And there was the little door." At the mention of it, he frowned. "She really seemed fascinated with the little door."

"Tell me about the door."

"The door, the door, what about the door? It was just a small, bricked-up door in the living room. It's right there if you want to see it." Here Charlie took on a detectable note of sarcasm. "Hey, why not have milk and cookies while I invite you into my living-room? Look, could you throw me a damn cloth for this cut?"

"Earn your cloth with answers," said the Man in White. "So you didn't notice anything unusual about the door?"

"No! Except..." And here both Charlie and Mel acquired distant looks, as if trying to recall something on the cusp of memory.

"There might have been something more to it? Think hard, Mr and Mrs Jones." Zoth-Ommog's servant had been a Beldam, hadn't it? "Think of webs and insects, of bitter-sweetness and scuttling in shadow. _Think_."

"I...there..." stammered Mel. What was the memory, at once so extraordinary and so vague? It must have been important, but why couldn't she recall it?

"Think of frost."

And it came roaring back in a deluge, a collective mental dam shattered with the force of the memory. Charlie and Mel involuntarily gasped with its force.

"There was...there was this woman. No, not a woman, this...this half woman, half spider _thing,"_ shuddered Charlie. "And I fell asleep suddenly...and I woke lying next to Mel on our hallway carpet."

"Only it wasn't _our_ hallway," whispered Mel. "There was ice and snow, and everything seemed _wrong_, somehow, and the thing was standing before us. She laughed when she saw us wake. "Two more for my brood," she cackled, "Bearing the promise of another. Coraline will come for you. Oh, she will come." And just like that, she vanished. And we huddled and waited together, and before long we saw Coraline through the mirror. I scrawled "Help us" before that thing's magic faded the mirror, and then, and then..."

"We saw through it later, but we were looking from the perspective of the snow-globe," continued Charlie. "And we saw her again, facing down that thing with a cat at her side."

"Really? Ah," said the Man in White, nodding at some confirmed theory. "Do continue."

"She tricked it," said Mel, her voice rising in pride. "She tricked the damn thing and snatched away the snowglobe. From what we could see after, she escaped the thing's web and kicked it in the face for good measure, and she outran it down the little door's passage."

Mel and Charlie stopped and met each other's gaze, pride resplendent in both their expressions.

"She saved us," breathed Charlie. "She went into that thing's lair to get us out."

"Incredible," yawned the Man in White, his mind racing with an assessment of the child's abilities. She had no small measure of cunning, that much was plain, and she could plan on the go. Fairly agile and strong for her age, to escape and kick the Beldam like that, and utterly determined when she was inclined to be.

A formidable foe. _Relatively_ formidable, that was, by the standards of her species. Still no match for an Outer God.

"And so lessons were learned, the spoils went to the victor, and she continued with her everyday life," continued the Man in White. "So tell me, and I promise, this is my last question. Where is your daughter now?"

Mel and Charlies' looks of pride were erased and replaced with looks of blank hostility. They turned to face the Man in White, meeting his gaze with an iron resolve.

"You stand there, with a razor in your hand, having broken into our home and threatened us and attacked us, and you expect us to tell us where our daughter is?" spat Mel. "Not for love, nor money, nor fear, will I tell you."

"Go to hell," said Charlie, more succinctly.

The Man in White shrugged. He had other means of getting the information, and the question had only been half-expected to get a response. Clearly, he had underestimated Mr and Mrs Jones.

Now he had but to clear up loose ends.

The razor _leapt_ towards Charlie's throat, plunging down and into his jugular. His eyes bulged, and before he could so much as gurgle, the razor swept sideways like a knife through butter, sending blood spraying across the kitchen. The Man in White coupled this with a hard shove, and the chair on which Charlie was sat fell sideways.

His head cracked off the counter surface with a sickening retort, and he lay still.

Mel screamed, a feral, primeval ululation of pure sorrow and desperation and fury, and she cracked through the binding duct tape with adrenaline's gifted strength. Before the Man in White could stop her, she swept round to the counter behind her and grabbed a bread knife from it.

She sprang back to the Man in White, who caught her upwards swing with the razor blade, locking it in place and pressing into Mel, meeting her face to face.

The last time he had seen eyes like Mel's, thought the Man in White approvingly, he had just made a snide insinuation regarding the mother of a seventh-century Viking Berserker seated across from him, and had knocked over his pint for good measure.

"Go on," he said with a smile, "Show some rage. Avenge your dead husband."

"_Bastard_," shrieked Mel, swinging the knife upwards with fury-fuelled strength and sending the razor flying across the kitchen. The knife rose, and sloped...

And shot down and rammed into the Man in White's right eye, shattering the glasses lens.

The Man in White's hand seized her wrist, holding the knife in place. His other hand seized her throat.

"A brave effort," hissed the Man in White, blood gushing from his eye socket as his unholy grip buckled the bones in Mel's wrist. "But futile. Take this knowledge to your grave, Mrs Jones," and his grip around her throat tightened, "I will find your daughter, with or without your help. _And she will die at my hand_."

And as Mel summoned the air to spit some last defiance, the Man in White's hand slammed shut like a vice, and cleared his loose ends.

He let her body slump to the floor, and wandered to the sink to wash his body's hands.

It would have been easier, he thought, to just use my eyes. But I suppose that would have left suspicious bodies, with no discernible cause of death. Let them call it a burglary gone horribly wrong.

It occurred to him that a bleeding eye would excite comment in public, so he scooped out the remains and cauterized the socket with some caustic fluid he found in a cupboard. He plugged up the socket with a ball of cotton wool. He took a new pair of sunglasses from a drawer in some bedroom. He hunted for a calendar.

He found one, and saw inscribed in the box for one of the days, "C. To Rhode Is."

He then listened for any noise, to find whether any of the neighbours had heard what had gone on. But fortunately for the neighbours, there was no noise from above or below. He then used the Jones' telephone to arrange a flight to Rhode Island from the nearest airport. He then retrieved his razor.

As he left, he picked up his satchel, opened it, and stared down at the broken and barely-conscious cat within.

"I do apologise for undoing your work over the summer, Ulthar," he said. "But rest asssured that I'll soon be doing so much more."

With that, he left, leaving red footprints behind him.

* * *

On the flight home to Oregon, Coraline felt whispers of unease crawl through her skull.

"Creatures like he spoke about hunting for us," she said to Wybie. "That's too horrible for me to think about. How about you?"

"I'll be keeping an eye out," said Wybie with grim determination. "And I'll see if my uncle'll let me borrow his air gun."

As they touched down in the airport and were picked up by the school bus, Coraline and Wybie sat in silence.

The bus stopped about a hundred yards distant from the Pink Palace. Coraline got out and and Wybie accompanied her.

As they neared the house, Coraline saw blue and red lights flashing in the dusk.

_...keep a watchful eye on your families and loved ones..._

And the whispers became voices.

She began running, with Wybie rushing to catch up, and could see Mr Bobinsky and Miss Spink and Miss Forcible standing outside, talking to police officers.

And the voices became shouts.

She broke into a sprint, running full-pelt towards the open door, darting past her neighbours and two officers.

"Dear, you mustn't..."

"Caroline, please do not..."

"Wait, you can't..."

She ignored them all and ran, as if trying trying to outrun what she feared would face her.

_...indiscriminate in their retribution..._

And the shouts became screams.

She charged through the door, knocking aside a startled detective, and scurried under a yellow band of tape and rounded the corner into the kitchen and saw...

...red.

The kitchen had been badly knocked about, she saw that at once, with chairs and fallen knives and confused police officers every which way, and everywhere she looked, every surface was red, _red_, slick and crimson with the blood of...

No. Oh god. No no no no no.

She fell to her knees beside them, too shocked to scream, reaching out to them, as if to bring them back.

The world turned and blurred and roared around her, as she screamed finally and seized the prone figures. The blood on them soaked her clothes, but she was beyond caring, her world narrowing down to a single blood-red point.

The police milled and dithered, torn between gently pulling her away from a murder scene and patting her on the back, whilst the tower's whispering resounded in her mind, growing louder and louder and louder until it became a scream. In the back of her brain, she heard the laughter of hungry gods.


	9. Relocation

Lovecraft slammed down the phone, and tried not to curse aloud.

The elation he had felt upon hearing of the girl's victory over the Beldam now felt hollow after the message from Abra. Cold-blooded murder of her parents, no doubt by some twisted monster of the Outer Realms. Such was the price of fighting the abominations beyond. It had only been the accidental foresight of Abra that had ensured that the girl had escaped the attack.

To hell with it all. He felt every day of his hundred and twenty years. How could he compete against monsters like that which had struck in Oregon?

A rap at the door broke him out of his dark thoughts, and he looked up and called "Enter."

The man who entered, Monsieur Gautreau, was one of the oldest in the Order. Born in New Orleans in the late 18th century, he was a gaunt, dark Creole who proudly bore a long rapier at his side. His drab black suit was his only concession to the modern era, everything else about him took pride in his distant history, almost obsessively so.

"Mondemoiseau Lovecraft," he began, the archaic expression for a young man betraying his age (you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn't either "mondemoiseau" or "mademoiselle" to him), "There have been dispatches from Scandinavia. One of the Larssons claims he has uncovered and dealt with an Ithaqua cult in Svalbard. Ottoline has banished a dimensional shambler that was preying on orphans in Stockholm. There are more trivial reports if you wish to peruse them."

Silence.

"Mondemoiseau?"

"Oh. Forgive me, Gautreau. I'm afraid there has been bad news from Oregon."

"A death?"

"Two."

"Do we have agents there? Which agents?"

"No, they were civilians. The parents of the girl we had over earlier today."

Gautreau frowned. "You suspect Outer Realm involvement?"

"Yes. And what's more, I believe they are linked to the recent string of murders. You recall that we lost Cain in Red Hook? And that Lake and Upton were found dead after that mission in Los Angeles? I suspect that something is preying on us, on the order itself."

"Your plan of action?"

"We wait. We watch. And we strike when ready. In the meantime..." Lovecraft sighed. "We must see to the girl's safety. Whatever attacked her parents was aiming for her, not them. Contact Abra and make the necessary arrangements."

"D'accord," said Gautreau, turning on his heel and marching out of the room.

Lovecraft sat and brooded at his desk. Behind him, through the large window, lightning flashed across a dark, furious sky. He paid it no heed. Storms over Providence were nothing new.

He only hoped he might not have brought down another.

* * *

"What's your take?" asked Lieutenant Dalziel, huddling beneath a section of the external stairs, out of the plummeting rain.

"A bloody riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma, like that British high-honcho was on about," said Detective Foley, fumbling for a cigarette with soaking fingers.

They were standing on the porch of the Pink Palace, both pondering the murders that had happened there last week, and both appreciating the irony of them originally signing on with the force in Ashland because it seemed like a nice, quiet place.

"How's that?" the Lieutenant enquired.

"Look at the facts," said Foley, touching a lighter flame to the cigarette tip. "We've got a pair of murder victims in their kitchen. None of the doors or windows are damaged, so the killer must have been someone they knew, or at least tricked their way in. Only none of the immediate relatives are that immediate, on account of the closest relative being in Michigan. The neighbours consist of that Russian you talked to yesterday, who was in Ashland for the entire time-frame of the attack, and two ladies old enough to be my grandmothers. And none of them saw anything, although it was one of the old ladies who alerted us."

"Trickery, then."

"Alright then. So once they're inside, the killer ties the two to chairs, and kills one of them with a blade to the throat, and another by crushing their throat." Foley took a long, leisurely drag on the cigarette then, and blew a perfect smoke circle into the rain. "The actions of the killer aren't in question; it's the motives that puzzle me."

"The chief thought it could be a burglary that ended in murder."

Foley shook her head. "Nothing was taken from the house as best we could tell. A laptop was there, and had been untouched. The bedroom dresser had a purse with money in it, and hadn't been touched. Nothing valuable had been taken, no gaping gaps, no fingerprints on anything, absolutely nothing in the way of theft."

"A thrill-killing then? Or maybe something to do with drugs?"

"No. Theft would have still been likely to occur in either of these cases, and thrill killers would have likely left more wounds on their victims."

"No private theories?"

"No. This thing is just peculiar from beginning to end. The kid can't even tell us anything about it, because she was away on a school trip when it happened."

A moment of contemplation and smoking passed before Dalziel spoke again.

"How is she, anyway?"

"Shock, grief, incomprehension, the whole damn trifecta. She was picked up by a pair of Child Services people the day before yesterday, who said they were taking them to her aunt in Rhode Island. They had all the necessary documentation, so I just let them. The sooner she's away from this, the better."

She dragged on the cigarette once more before continuing. "Didn't recognise them, though. Young lady who looked Arabic, and an elderly man who had a French accent. They ring any bells for you?"

"No. But if they checked out, I'm sure they were okay. You finish that thing and meet me inside when you're done. We'll finish that sweep of the living room." With that, Dalziel stepped into the house.

Foley blew out another smoke ring. She absent-mindedly wondered when this crappy weather would ever let up.

* * *

Warlock, a battered old tabby who served as the unofficial mascot of the order in Providence, purred as he rubbed himself against Coraline's shins. She reached down from her armchair to stroke him, the fur soft and warm to the touch. For a moment, she let her mind sink into the comfort of her surroundings: the softness of the cat, the smell of woodsmoke from the fireplace, the warmth from the fire, the sight of the old paintings along the wall.

The part of her that wasn't admiring the drawing room of the house in Providence was as tense and sharp as an arrow, focused on Lovecraft and the old albino woman seated in the sofa across from her.

Once more, she would get some answers from the order.

She had been huddled in her bedroom when the policewoman on duty had told her Child Services had come to take her to her aunt. She had been too distraught and in shock to answer most of their questions, and the police had given up after a couple of days.

Two people had come upstairs. She didn't recognise the man, but she recognised the woman as Miss Alhazred.

"Wha..." she had begun.

"You have to come to Providence," said Miss Alhazred, dressed in a plain black suit. "We suspect the Outer Realms to have involved in the deaths of your parents, and you have to come with us."

There had been no argument brooked. And now she was back in the house.

"I apologise for taking you back here so soon after the tragic deaths of your parents," began Lovecraft, "But your safety must be seen to. Your parents were not the targets of a human madman, but rather by a being of the Outer Realms."

"The Outer Realms creatures kill...killed my parents?" Coraline managed. She couldn't cry, not now, not after she had done so much of it.

"I'm afraid so," said Lovecraft, his legs crossed as he sipped at a steaming mug of cocoa. "And I fear that I suspect which one."

"It had tew be one o' the Outer Gods," said the woman abruptly. Her pink eyes bored into Coraline as she spoke. "The Great Old Ones are shackled, shackled and no damn threat unless yew bump into them or dream o' them. Lesser critters wouldn't have had no sufficyent finesse to carry off deaths that clean. No, Outer Gods is the only real prospect."

"An Outer God, certainly," said Lovecraft. "And the only candidate is Nyarlathotep."

Coraline remember the tale Howard had told about the vastly powerful Outer Gods, and the most cunning and cruel of all of them.

"So what do we do?" she said.

"Well, in the meantime, I intend for you to stay here while we make sure that..."

"No," said Coraline, steel in her voice. "How are we going to kill Nyarlathotep?"

Silence had no time to linger for a few moments, for Lavinia, the old albino, let loose a raucous whistle at Coraline's question.

"Tall order there," she said. "That's an Outer God you're talkin' about gitting gone. 'Tain't a matter o' picking up yer gun and filling him with lead."

"The _Necronomicon_, as I explained last time," said Lovecraft patiently, "No doubt contains details on the means of destroying an Outer God permanently. But we cannot access that knowledge without going insane, or worse. Rest assured, Coraline, on the day we gain that knowledge, _all_ the gods shall burn. But until then, I fear it is impossible..."

"Don't you dare talk about impossible," snapped Coraline, grief giving way to anger.

"Now, Coraline..."

But it was too late, and Coraline rose out of her seat with a face like thunder.

"You were born dreaming of horrors beyond the universe, horrors which you found out were real!" she shouted, making Warlock look up in alarm. "I met, fought, and defeated a damn monster through a door in my living room! And you talk about _impossible_?"

"That..."

"A month ago, I knew nothing about Great Old Ones or, or Beldams, or any of this crap about the Outer Realms! I was just angry about moving from Michigan, and happy to stay that way! And now I've met one of the creatures, had my parents _killed_ by them, and found a secret society dedicated to destroying them. _Impossible_?" She stopped, still seething. "If you're scared to read the _Necronomicon_, then give it to me. I'll read it, find out all about them, and avenge my parents myself!"

Silence ruled the room for several moments, and Lovecraft suddenly barked with laughter.

"Listen to yourself, Miss Jones. You've just declared war against the universe. Do you mean to single-handedly pit yourself against these cosmic horrors and win?"

"Of course not," said Coraline, "I'll accept _some_ help from you."

The same Coraline Jones that had rescued her parents from the Other World, that had kicked a Beldam in the face, that had gone through a trial by fire in her contact with the Outer Realms, locked gazes with Lovecraft and Lavinia. Fires blazed in the dark centres of her hazel eyes.

Lovecraft blinked first.

"You certainly don't lack for confidence, I'll give you that much. Though your estimation of the beings we fight may be a bit off." He got up from the sofa, Lavinia following him a second later.

"There's a bed arranged for you upstairs. Lavinia can help you settle in. Tomorrow, we can discuss your future with the order. You could be one of our greatest, given time and experience."

Holy god, he thought as he left, were there a few hundred more like that one, then no servant of the Outer Realms could ever rest easy...

"C'mon," said Lavinia to the silent Coraline, "Yer room's upstairs."

"Real sorry 'bout yer folks, by the way," Lavinia continued as the two walked up a flight of stairs, "Jest terrible, that was. But Howard now, he's a good man, and he'll bring some sort of justice about for yew. Yew know his hist'ry an' all, I take it?"

"Me, on the other hand," said Lavinia, as they turned a corner in a corridor, "I was pressed into a little sorta, _dalliance_, if yew catch my meaning, with one o' the creatures beyond. Got pregnant too. Gave birth to a kid, who maybe had tew much o' Dad in him. Ended in tears and destruction around Dunwich, o' course. I had left years ago, as well, and only heard about the results from Howard when I was waiting tables in Boston. One thing led to another, and now I'm a dues-payin' member of the order."

"Yew ain't much of a talker, are ya?" said Lavinia, as they stopped before a door. "Well, here's your room all ready. Yer stuff's already inside, and there's a bathroom down the corridor tew yer left if'n you need it. Tip the doorman, now." She winked. "Jest kiddin'. Make yerself at home, and talk tew me if ye've got any problems."

With that, she left, leaving Coraline to her new room.

It had previously done duty as a storeroom, and Coraline got the impression that the clearing for her arrival had been a little hasty. They'd forgotten to remove the elephant gun, for one thing, which was leaning against one of the bleached walls. The room itself was fairly large, with a couple of dressers around the sides and a dusty bed in the centre. An overhead lamp gave the darkness a faint golden tinge.

Her hastily-packed suitcase lay on the bed's centre, and she opened it, rummaging through the contents. Clothes...those could be stuffed into the dresser drawers, toothbrush...she put that aside for later, hat...

She stopped, and picked up the hat. It was the only reassuring thing in this house, a little black-peaked reminder of a sane previous life. She remembered, when she was little, her dad telling her how he'd bought it when he'd spent a couple of months in Japan while he was in his teens. She remembered her mom letting her wear it for her first day of school, though it had reached down to her ears then.

She clenched the hat in both hands, sat on the bed, and her shoulders began to shake.

Lavinia, who had been outside tying a shoe lace, moved away to give the girl her privacy. God knew she needed it.

* * *

Wybie sat on the bed in his room, his mind still racing.

Strange, that her parents' murders should occur so quickly after they found out about the Outer Realms. The two had to be connected...but how?

Wybie's mind was very well suited to putting together pieces and seeing their relationships, whether the pieces were machine parts or bits of knowledge. He was putting it to work now, even as it recovered from the twin shocks of the murders and Coraline's departure. All he'd been able to find out about the last one was that someone who bore a suspiciously close resemblance to Miss Alhazred had been involved, which was yet another piece to factor in.

Rain clattered against the window as his mind buzzed. His night would be long and sleepless.

* * *

The cabin crew stood at the doors leading out of the aircraft that had touched down in Newport State Airport.

"Thank you for flying with us," they parroted as passengers passed. "We hope you enjoy Newport."

"Second time lucky," said the Man in White as he stepped past and out into the driving rain.


	10. Red Reckoning

The Man in White stared up at the house through a sleeting shroud of rain and mist, thunder rumbling amidst the dark sky. He held his razor in one hand, and reins in another. The satchel had been stored elsewhere for the time being.

He snarled at the creature held by the reins as it stirred, and turned back to the house and craned his head to get a clear image of it through his remaining eye. The loss of the eye had proved irksome, not merely because it limited the body's vision, but also because the Man in White had been trying to keep this particular body in good condition. He had taken it from a card-sharper on a St Louis riverboat in the 19th century, and had appreciated the nimbleness and co-ordination of it. His previous body, a stocky Italian knight, hadn't been much fun.

Well, he would have ample opportunity to exact revenge for the eye soon enough.

"House," he said to the creature beside him. "People in. Kill. Understood?"

The creature gurgled by means of response.

"Go," said the Man in White simply, dropping the reins and letting the creature slither through the rain, up towards the sleeping house.

It would keep the occupants distracted while the Man in White settled his own affairs.

* * *

Titus, Thomas Olney, Joel Manton and John Legrasse sat around the table in the front room of the house, their minds focused on the table's contents.

Olney broke the silence with a cough.

"Mrs Peacock, in the hall, with the candlestick," he said with some satisfaction.

"Now I know you're cheating," said Manton, checking the envelope, "That's the sixth time in a row you've got it right first try without actually playing."

"What sort of man cheats at a board-game?" said Legrasse in some disbelief.

"What sort keeps playing with a known cheat?" said Olney, lighting his pipe.

"You're surely not using that disembodied soul of yours again to peek inside the envelope, are you?" inquired Titus. "Legerdemain's fine and good in any game, but using the soul, that's just _unfair_."

"'Tis just a God-given gift," said Olney, "Or some god, anyway." He took the cards and deftly reshuffled them.

"Who's up for another..." and then he stopped, and frowned, and motioned for the others to be quiet. Listening intently, they could hear a vague sort of slithering, muffled by the driving rain, growing closer and closer.

Wordlessly, they reached around their persons and into their black suits for hidden pistols and knives and jars of sand.

And they sprang back from the wall just as it exploded in a shower of plaster and dust, the billowing clouds obscuring a huge, seething, pulsing, gibbering shoggoth. The game pieces lay forgotten on the floor as the men and the shoggoth stared each other down.

"You see what happens when you cheat, Olney?" said Manton, uncorking a jar of sand. "Karma. Damn karma."

And as Legrasse drew a bead on a (presumed) limb, and Titus held aloft a silver knife, and Olney aimed down the sights of two revolvers, and Manton dashed out the sand, the shoggoth sprang forward in a tangle of tentacles and amorphous limbs, and chaos ensued.

* * *

In Coraline's dreams, the tower rose out of the ice plateau, the shrieking wind buffeting her back and the dark whispering drawing her forward.

"What are you?" screamed her dream-self. "What do you want with me?"

The tower, she suddenly realised, had noticed her, and she felt a vast, alien will turning on her and crashing down upon her own will, examining her mind and soul inside and out while she staggered on powerless.

**I?**, came the reverberating timbre of the tower.** I want nothing. It is you who is drawn to me. Only, and always, you.**

Coraline stirred from her sleep , avoiding the door in the tower's base as crashing came from downstairs.

Rising quickly out of bed and pressing her ear to the floor, she could make out the warbling and thuds of the berserk shoggoth, muffled by the floors in between. There also came the sound of gunfire and...was that an explosion?

Forcing the memory of the tower from her mind, she threw an old grey dressing-gown on top of her orange pajamas, and went for the elephant gun. She grabbed it and, opening the door, half hefted - half dragged the huge rifle with her.

There was shouting from downstairs as well; which grew in volume as more and more order members joined the fight.

Coraline wasn't sure why she was making her way to the fight. All she knew that the order seemed to having a difficult time of it, and she had always disliked the feeling of not getting involved while people needed help.

But as she marched down the dark winding corridor, heaving the gun, she heard a cough behind her.

She swivelled, and saw a dapper man with blond hair, a white suit, a pair of sunglasses, and a razor twinkling in his hand.

"Miss Jones," said the Man in White, his cruel smile playing at his lips, "You cannot imagine how pleased I am to make your acquaintance."

He stepped forward, and Coraline brought up the gun.

"Step back," she said, her voice trembling in terror.

"Coraline Wednesday Jones," continued the Man in White. "Born on March the 13th, 1998, to Charlie Heckleburg Jones and Melanie Olivia Jones, nee Llewellyn. Shuffled off this mortal coil today, on September the 14th, 2009." His eyes glowed with satisfaction behind the glasses. "Exactly a week after the murders of her parents. A tragic tale, but with a fitting conclusion. Would you prefer that I finished this quickly, or slowly?"

Coraline stared open-mouthed at the Man in White, her mind buzzing with fear.

Fear giving way to realisation, as she suddenly knew her parents' killer.

Realisation giving way to fury.

"_Bastard_," she screamed, as the Man in White stepped forward with the shining razor, and the elephant gun roared forth fire and lead. The gun's recoil bashed into Coraline's belly, and the red-hot bullet thundered into the Man in White's chest. He was carried backwards off his feet by the force of the blast, his chest a red ruin and his face a mask of surprise, the razor jerking out of his hands and onto the floor next to Coraline. She dropped the gun, her stomach aching from the blow, and scrabbled for the razor as the Man in White convulsed on the floor. She seized it and ran, her footsteps echoing down the corridor as the Man in White pulled himself upwards, slowly, painfully, inch by bloody inch.

"Urk," he said, and spat some blood that had flowed up into the body's mouth. He grabbed the fallen elephant gun by the barrel, and hefted it onto his shoulder as he set off after her.

This, he felt, had ceased to become amusing when she had irreparably harmed the body. Now she would die by inches.

He wondered how the shoggoth was faring. The people downstairs were putting up a suspiciously good fight against it, judging by the noise. Ordinary humans normally didn't last that long against an Outer Realms creature.

* * *

Lovecraft stopped on his way down the stairs after he heard the distinctive bark of the elephant gun.

He looked at the situation before him. Nobody was injured or dead as of yet, and Abra seemed to have the situation under control, shouting orders this way and that as order members milled, directing fire onto the shoggoth which had temporarily trapped itself in a doorway.

"Gautreau, Lavinia," he said, turning to the two behind him, "Back the way. We must investigate that shot."

"But the shoggoth..." began Lavinia.

"Is being dealt with," said Lovecraft. "But I have my fears about that shot. Follow me." And back up the stairs he went, Gautreau and Lavinia trailing behind him.

They went on up the stairs and through the first floor, and rushed up the staircase to the second floor. Lovecraft was sure he could hear talking, but he couldn't place the voice.

When they came upon a large patch of blood a few yards outside Coraline's room, a patch which left a trail down and around the corridor and corner, Gautreau drew his long, sharp, double-edged rapier and Lavinia her revolver. They followed the trail, rounding several more corners before they saw it vanish through an ajar door, which led to a storeroom. Stepping closer, Lovecraft could hear the voice more clearly.

"...cannot hide here forever, girl. Step out and your passing will be swift. Else I shall show you the same mercy I showed your parents..."

Lovecraft breathed out, and took out one of the two jars of Kadath sand he kept in an inside pocket in his suit jacket. He and the other two opened the door. They saw the Man in White, hefting the elephant gun with one hand, standing in the room's centre and scanning the sides of the room for the lurking Coraline, who had concealed herself behind a convenient grandfather clock. A flickering electric light on the ceiling cast the room into patches of shadow and gold.

The Man in White turned at their approach, and his eyes narrowed.

Lovecraft suddenly had an entirely bad feeling about this. Gautreau and Lavinia didn't.

"Aim for his arms and legs, Lavinia," commanded Gautreau, brandishing his blade and striding towards the Man in White.

"Gautreau, be careful, this isn't..." said Lovecraft to no avail.

Gautreau leapt forward at the same time as the Man in White, the sword glancing off the swung gun stock and the two colliding together. The Man in White aimed a vicious left hook at Gautreau's kidneys, a blow which Gautreau avoided with an easy dodge and which he responded to with a flurry of swipes and thrusts at the Man in White. Two shots rang out from Lavinia, clipping the Man in White's elbow and leg, and Gautreau pressed forward with a relentless assault, his sword a grey ghost in the air.

The Man in White ducked or parried or dodged most of the sword blows, taking those he could not avoid on his arms and across his chest. He slammed the gun stock up into Gautreau's chest, sending him reeling backwards. The Man in White stepped forward to take advantage of the opening, leaving his middle exposed. Gautreau took the chance near-instantly, the sword sliding up and through the Man in White's gut.

"Was that your worst, _Monsieur_?" enquired Gautreau, his face slick with sweat, his hand tight around the handle of the blade jammed into the Man in White's stomach. "Was that the entirety of your skill?"

"No," said the Man in White with a leer, "This is." His right hand dropped the gun, and clamped tight around Gautreau's sword hand, crushing it. His left hand shot out, and buckled the reality of Gautreau's chest before it.

Gautreau's face paled, his eyes dulled, his mouth dribbled blood. He spat it onto the Man in White's face.

The Man in White's right hand dashed out and snapped Gautreau's neck at a ninety degree angle. Gautreau's ruined body collapsed backwards onto the floor, the sword sticking out of the Man in White's chest like a standard. The Man in White grasped the handle and swept out the sword in one movement, sending an arc of blood flying against the wall. He ducked under another shot from the revolver, and span the blade up to connect sharply with the gun, knocking it out of Lavinia's hands. He followed the curve of the blow, bringing the blade around and tip, scoring a red line across Lavinia's arm. As she stumbled back, reaching for a knife, the Man in White stepped forward and poleaxed her with one smooth blow to the throat. She crumpled into the wall, and lay still.

"And then there was one," said the Man in White, turning to Lovecraft, the upheld blade scarlet in the flickering light. "Tell me, sir, how do you wish to die?"

"For preference," began Lovecraft, his voice as cold and flat as a glacier, "My death will be in a comfortable bed, at an advanced age, after a superb meal, and many decades after your _own," _and his hand flew out and a trail of sand leapt from it to the Man in White's face. The Man in White screamed and recoiled as if scalded, and Lovecraft drew out the second jar of sand. The Man in White stared at him through a veil of pain, not the trivial sort pain that the body endured, but a deep, striking pain at the essence of Nyarlathotep. The grains tugged at the Outer God, and tore at the connection that kept him in this reality.

"Who are you?" hissed the Man in White. "How did you acquire Kadath sa...?" And behind the sunglasses, the remaining eye bulged in sudden realisation and shock.

"But you're meant to be dead, Lovecraft!"

"I'm very much alive," snapped Lovecraft, "As are many of those you believed dead or insane at your hands." The sand from the second jar shifted from hand to hand, and Lovecraft's gaze became glassy as he began to drone "Kth'nalkyr sar itha'lakr'tal kacch..." the grains now buzzing and glowing with sorceric energy as they blurred between his hands.

The Man in White snarled, and brought the rapier whistling down through the air...

...and Coraline struck.

She stepped out from behind the clock, the razor in hand, and dropped to one knee. She'd only get one shot at this, but she'd always been good at throwing things, whether they were rocks or snowballs or flashlights or startled Elder Gods. She kept one eye open, narrowing her focus on the Man in White's throat, and grasped the razor by the handle. Her hand swept forward and opened, the razor spinning out and into the air.

For a moment, it was frozen in the air, a tiny steel messenger. It sliced through the air, through floating dust particles, and through the Man in White's jugular, embedding itself in the carotid artery for good measure.

The Man in White staggered and gurgled, frothing and gouting blood every which way, and Lovecraft had the time he needed to finish the incantation.

"...yrr aduin'eklkn hshalt!" The sand leapt for the Man in White.

There was a brilliant flash of pure blinding light, so bright that it hurt even when Coraline hastily shut her eyes, a smell of blazing pyres, and a sound of thwarted fury, fading as if cast away by a wind.

And when the flash faded and Coraline opened her eyes, there was nothing but a trembling Lovecraft, a prone Lavinia, a crumpled Gautreau, and the body of the Man in White prostrate on the wooden floor.

His sunglasses had fallen off, revealing the left side of his face, and a dull, china-blue eye.

"He...it is not dead," coughed Lovecraft. "The host is dead, but Nyarlathotep is banished, and only for a month. Even Kadath sand is not sufficient for an Outer God, and it can only banish in any case, and..." He ceased rambling, and turned and hurried to Lavinia, who was beginning to stir.

"Hurts," she croaked, as Lovecraft knelt down and examined her.

"Superficial cut to the arm, a badly bruised throat – don't exercise that too much - , and likely a concussion from the impact against the wall." He patted her shoulder. "We'll have you back and fighting fit in no time, my dear."

"The fu' hit me?" managed Lavinia.

"An Outer God. Now, as for...oh," said Lovecraft, turning to Gautreau. He examined the duelist from every angle. He checked for a pulse, he checked for breathing with a mirror, with only a glimmer of hope. Finally he stopped, sighed, and closed Gautreau's eyes gently with the tip of a finger.

"Damn it all," he said. "He was one of our finest." Standing up, he then noticed Coraline, who was as still as a statue.

There was _blood_ everywhere.

"There, there," said Lovecraft, as comfortingly as he could as Coraline retched. "I do believe that you can now claim to have vanquished two Outer Realms creatures, Coraline. Abra was right to recommend you. An Outer God, of all things." He laughed, a dry, bitter laugh.

"He killed my parents," said Coraline, after the retching had ceased. "But he isn't..."

"Only banished. Hah, I say _only_. That took more out of me than was healthy. And it killed one of us. And it knows of us. Damn my pride." He helped Lavinia up, and placed an arm around Coraline's shoulders. "Let's find out how the others have fared."

They made down to the ground floor, and saw devastation. Walls caved in, plaster and masonry strewn across the intact floors, and a great many pieces of exploded shoggoth. No dead bodies, thankfully. Some of the order were clustered at the sides, groaning and grumbling over battered limbs. Miss Alhazred, nursing a broken arm, called out more orders, her eyes flickering with an alertness only normally seen on collies. Some other order members were collecting and preserving bits of shoggoth.

"Here's a nice squamous bit," called Titus, as the three descended.

"Howard," cried Miss Alhazred, turning and wincing. She hobbled over. "The shoggoth must have been directed to us, it couldn't have just..."

"I know. We fought the directer. Gautreau is dead," said Lovecraft grimly.

"More "got the tar whipped outta us by the directer"," muttered Lavinia.

Miss Alhazred stared.

"Gautreau dea...what happened? Who led the shoggoth?"

"The Crawling Chaos," said Lovecraft. Coraline moved away and sat next to a disembodied shoggoth eye, which stared up accusingly. "Banished for a month with most of my Kadath sand, and the actions of Coraline."

"But he knows of us now," continued Lovecraft, "Just as we know of him. I fear things are about to become very complicated indeed."

He stood and swayed amidst the sudden storm of questions and fear and excitement.

"Before I answer anything else, could someone get me a brandy?"


	11. Increasing Complications

**Sorry about the time taken for a relatively short chapter, but the internet across Scotland chose this weekend to keel over and temporarily die. Here's wishing everyone a good Halloween.**

* * *

Nyarlathotep was unsettled and angry in equal quantities.

Angry at himself; that mere humans had been able to banish _him_ from their pathetic world, that he had permitted them to call upon the resources and knowledge to win a battle against him. Angry at them, for daring to face him, for daring to presume that they could ultimately succeed against the power he could bring to bear.

Unsettled by what had transpired in that house; with an old target resurfacing and not only proving himself not dead, but to be plotting against Nyarlathotep and presumably all the Outer Realms. An old target with too much knowledge about the Outer Gods.

How long had the man survived the cancers inflicted on him from afar? How long had he been scheming and uniting all those scattered survivors, who had not merely banished, but _killed_, one of the most powerful shoggoths available to the Crawling Chaos. To what extent had this rot set in amongst humanity?

The humans had not won the eternal war, but they had won one battle too many.

Nyarlathotep circled and fretted, his true form drifting amongst the infinite chaos of the Outer Realm. The closest a human could come to beholding his form would have been as a great serpent, lithe and shimmering with obsidian scales and topped with a dark grinning skull. Eldritch green fire flickered through the gaps between scales and the sockets in the skull. His true length could encircle galaxies, his eye centres were black holes, his malevolence was unending.

He was concerned by the battle, for it set the natural order on its head. What right had humans to challenge the gods? What right had they to succeed?

This had to ended now, decided the Crawling Chaos. All the long-nurtured development of humanity by the Outer Realms could be cast aside; there was too much risk in allowing humans to develop with Lovecraft's order amongst them. Especially if a mere child could participate in his destruction.

And luckily, Ulthar would provide the means for that ending.

Nyarlathotep's will alighted upon the satchel, a tiny material thing encased in a pocket of unreality in the Outer Realms.

"Ulthar," hissed Nyarlathotep, "I require the unbinding of the Great Old Ones."

+You'll understand, I'm sure, if I express a certain lack of desire to inflict those abominations upon the world,+ came the voice of the cat.

Nyarlathotep ignored it, reaching down towards the satchel and folding it within his nightmarish form. The Outer God then focused his will into his surroundings, making them crackle with power. Black marble arose around him, and the rising concentration of energy acted as a clarion call throughout the Outer Realms.

And _they_ answered.

One did not disobey the call of an Outer God, not even Great Old One. In time and ways unmeasurable or inconcievable, their forms gathered and clustered on the Court. Cthulhu's avatar was the first, and thousands followed in his wake.

+_**You have shed your human form, my lord**_,+ said Cthulhu. Eyes as black as the void between galaxies regarded the form of Nyarlathotep with a mild curiosity. +_**Did you tire of it?**_+

"Be silent unless you are addressed, slave," snarled Nyarathotep, his usual affability evaporated. "Call the rest of your brethren to attention."

Cthulhu, without comment, turned the others and loosed one trilling note from his hidden mouth that rooted them in place.

Nyarlathotep, composing himself, began.

"At the Court called by Zoth-Ommog, the capacity of humans to challenge us was dismissed by myself. I was wrong. They have..." He hissed to quell the sudden burst of questions. "I _shall_ have silence. When I pursued the child that so afflicted Zoth-Ommog, I encountered the most recent of the far-seers. We thought him dead. We were mistaken. And he has been gathering together those who have also encountered us and our servants. Gathering them into an order. An _army_."

+_what is the problem? they will not be listened to..._+ began Hastur.

The Crawling Chaos turned and struck. A shriek of agony erupted from a thousand mouths, and Hastur scrabbled across the marble and grovelled as best he could.

"_Listen, you cur, and do not interrupt me," _raged Nyarlathotep, the eyes of emerald flame flaring and spitting, the centres seeming to shriek with emptiness. "There are dozens, if not hundreds, in this new order. Hundreds who know about us, a number which can only increase! Hundreds who can educate their fellow man about us, and they _shall_ listen! And they will strike back."

He stopped and simmered, leaving the circle of Great Old Ones frozen in fear.

"They shall strike back, and they have already done so. The far-seer used sand from Kadath to banish me for a month. I cannot intervene on Earth for thirty of their days, by which time they could have alerted the rest of humanity. The rot is too deep to be cut away. Humanity must be purged from its world before the month is out, and we can start anew with whatever survivors poke their heads out from the caves in cratered mountains."

Cthulhu coughed, or the Outer Realms equivalent at least.

+_**How, my lord? We cannot intervene directly, and you by your own admission cannot act. And such a matter would be beneath the notice of Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth.**_+

"Well," said Nyarlathotep, with an insidious smile, "It so happens I have the means to release you from your bindings."

The Great Old Ones surged forward with interest., and Nyarlathotep produced the satchel, which he emptied out onto the plaza. Ulthar weakly stirred as he fixed the assembled company with a look of absolute loathing.

"Behold the greatest of the Elder Gods," announced Nyarlathotep, circling the prone cat. "The traitor to the Outer Realms, who chose to guard human interests against our intentions. Behold his form, a sentimental reminder of another Elder God, Bast, who I killed myself. Weak, corrupt, tainted by_ human_ morality. Pathetic and beneath our notice, but for one thing. He holds the bindings which keep you all imprisoned. Bindings which shall be broken, here and now."

He turned down to the cat. "Waste no time, Ulthar."

+Do your worst.+

The Crawling Chaos smiled. "Gladly." And the entirety of his will turned upon Ulthar, raking across his soul, stabbing into his essence, slicing into and exposing and shattering the core …

And Ulthar broke. He writhed in pain before the gods, and crackled with green fire. The air's texture changed slightly, and Ulthar lay still. The Great Old Ones began to notice a change, began to feel some great weight lifted off their backs. Those who could smiled, terrible ghoulish smiles.

"Go, all of you," commanded Nyarlathotep. "Act in my stead. Rise from the oceans and tombs and stars. Break like a tide upon the earth, and make humanity remember why it once feared the gods. Make them beg for a new dark age. _Burn them all_. Unleash your servants, unleash your fury, and shatter earth once and for all."

And as the Great Old Ones streamed out of the Outer Realms, Nyarlathotep waited alone on the great dark plaza and smiled down at Ulthar.

"Don't give me that look," he said. "Soon, we shall re-educate you on your proper place in the universe. No more shall your conscience force you to bend the knee to apes. You shall see," he chuckled, "Oh, you shall see. No more loose ends at all, ever."

His laughter echoed across the cosmos, a dead empty sound that spread and spread.


	12. Stars Rightened

Coraline entered her bedroom, pulled out the suitcase that lurked under the bed, and began to repack it. Warlock watched from the side with a detached interest, grooming himself with one paw and patting around a piece of shoggoth with the other.

Last night had...had...

Coraline, in her sleep-deprived state, fuelled only on a mug of coffee and residual adrenaline, couldn't summon the words to describe it.

She had fought her parent's murderer, she knew that much. She had shot him and attacked him with a razor, as far she could tell through the red fog of fury that obscured much of that memory. The French guy had been killed, and Lavinia had been hurt, and Howard had banished Nyarlathotep for a month, and a shoggoth (whatever _that_ was) had attacked and destroyed a piece of the house, and...

...And today hadn't really been any more relaxed than yesterday. She had managed to snatch a few hours of sleep in the small hours of the morning, and the order (did it have a name beyond "the order"? She resolved to find out.) had bustled about with apprehension and excitement, and Howard had withdrawn to his study to write letter after letter and make telephone call after telephone call. He only emerged at midday, and had promptly announced that the order would have to relocate, and begin a new campaign against the Outer Realms.

He had told Coraline and several other order members to pack tonight, for they would leave tomorrow with him to Washington. He had given different members different instructions, moving off in pairs or groups. Some had left tonight, some would also be leaving tomorrow, a couple would stay behind to manage the house. His eyes had practically glowed whenever he spoke, and Coraline guessed he was planning something big.

She threw in her clothes and toothbrush, and kept her hat on her head. Whatever happened in the coming days, she would meet it with her hat on. The Outer Realms had already caught her unprepared, and she had sworn to herself that it would never happen again. Next time, she'd have some of that sand.

And the time after the next time, she promised, she would have read the _Necronomicon_. It couldn't be as bad as Lovecraft claimed, could it?

There could be no room for nostalgia, for bitter-sweet remembrance of the life she would leave behind forever if she continued to aid the order. No return to the Pink Palace, to Mr B, to Spink and Forcible, to Wybie... She stopped herself abruptly. There was nothing left for her there, she told herself. Nothing at all.

But she had to stop herself several times as she finished packing.

* * *

In that day, if reality had a voice, it would have screamed a long, anguished scream as it was torn at to make way for the beings of the Outer Realms.

They awoke one by one, amidst shadows and darkness, to fires and shrieks.

The first of them arose in Dublin, underneath the Cathal Brugha Barracks.

"Keep up the pace, men," ordered Lieutenant Brennan as the squad he led moved through and down the winding steel corridors, to a disused room at the back of the barracks from which peculiar sounds had been heard by one of the technicians.

It was probably nothing, thought the lieutenant, who had offered to investigate the noise to relieve the monotony of his desk job. Sergeant Kelly and his squad from the infantry battalion stationed at the barracks had been taken along for the look of the thing.

They reached the room leading to the door beyond which the sounds had come from. The room was a huge thing, absurdly large for something only ever used to store a few munitions crates during Victoria's reign. A few electric lights gave the whole thing a comforting light, in spite of the long shadows cast by scattered cardboard boxes.

"Let's put the civvie's mind at ease," said Brennan, more than a touch sardonically. He waved a hand at the door some twenty metres distant. "I'll take point. Corporal Crilly, Privates McGuire and Hackett, you cover us. Everyone else, with me." He moved off, the squad marching after him.

The three left behind settled themselves down by the room entrance.

"Bit of a waste of time, is it not?" asked McGuire. "If the arrogant fecker wants a re..." whereupon he was promptly cuffed around the head by Crilly, who pointed furiously at the mouthpieces and earpieces on their helmets.

"Just sit down and be quiet, Dougal," he hissed, twitching his own mouthpiece to one side. "You've gotten us into enough trouble with him already. Mind that live-firing exercise?"

"Well, no. What happened then?" said McGuire, settling down on top of a crate.

"You know bloody well. God, the paperwork involved," muttered Crilly, leaning against the concrete wall. They watched the squad reach the door and open it. They watched them file through one by one. They watched them vanish into the room.

Then they couldn't watch them any more, on account of the lights flickering and dying, casting the room into pitch darkness.

"Feckin' power cut," muttered Hackett, reaching for his flashlight. The other two did the same.

Through their earpieces, they heard Brennan say "Damn lighting. Get your flashlights ou..." and then a dark demonic chuckle, laced with static from the brave attempts of the technology in the earpieces to transmit it.

Crilly blood froze at that chuckle. Nothing natural could have produced that.

"What the hell was...?" began Brennan, and then there was a scream, high and ear-piercing, that ended in choking.

"Who was that?" came Brennan's yell, followed by "Flashlights! Get your flaaaaaagh!" and the laughter erupted from the unseen throat, laced with even more static, and there was pandemonium and more screams from the earpieces.

"Hold on, we're coming in," barked Crilly into his mouthpiece, putting on a brave front in spite of the unutterable dread he felt of whatever it was in there. Something that was fighting a full squad of soldiers and _winning_.

"No!" screamed Sergeant Kelly. "Run, run before it comes for you! Ru..." and his last command was broken by the roar of gunfire and more demonic laughter. Whatever shrieks came down the earpieces were higher and shriller now, with a note of pleading in them. The three hefted their assault rifles, and ran into the darkened room.

And then came a smooth, insinuating hiss of +_you cannot run far enough, apes,_+ as slick and smooth as an oil slick, as vile and subtle as poison, slithering into Crilly's mind and leaving white-hot lines across his courage. It froze him there while McGuire and Hackett charged through the door, their rifles blazing into the night.

The illumination provided by the bursts of fire faded as Hackett, and then McGuire, were snatched away by something unseen, their screams echoing and bursting around the room, punctuated with the sound of ripping and frantic gurgling.

Crilly, numb and paralysed, raised his flashlight after a few moments and pressed the button on the side.

The beam revealed something standing a scant few metres in front of Crilly. It was covered by a hooded, patchwork yellow cloak, topped with a twisted steel crown. It towered above him. The remains of McGuire dangled from one claw. It stood still, appraising the trembling Crilly.

Where was a fecking chaplain when you needed one, thought the bitter part of Crilly, the part which was at this moment kicking itself for not going into the priesthood like it had originally planned.

+_a soldier of earth,_+ mused the King in Yellow. +_a defender, an aggressor, armed with humanity's instruments of war._+

+_if the challenge posed by your companions was any indication, then this will be a waste of my time. nyarlathotep must be weak indeed._+

The Taterdemalion King stood still, and then lunged for Crilly, its hood flying up to reveal...

Crilly's last screams echoed around the room and down the corridor, lasting considerably longer than their creator.

A camera in the corridor, manned by a previously bored technician., picked up on the trickle of blood that came down from the room. It recorded the screaming. It picked up the nightmarish form of Hastur, drifting down the corridor like a spectre streaked with blood.

Alarms began to shriek across the barracks and out into the streets. They would do little good.

* * *

Jun Haiqing took her position as curator of the Beijing Art Museum very seriously, and no wonder.

She had moved constantly up through the ranks of the bureaucracy surrounding the museums in China, had worked hard to forge a place for herself in what was, as were so many other things, a male-dominated field, and had done so out of a genuine desire to serve the best interests of art in the nation.

And such a history of art! There were paintings and murals and other works in her museum, exquisite works from millennia of craftsmanship. Carvings and treasures and porcelains and engravings and statues and relics dating back to before the Roman Empire.

It was during nights like this that Jun savoured all her hard work, when she got to walk alone after closing hours through all the wonders in the museum. Nights like this let her truly savour the beauty that her civilisation had produced.

She rounded a corner and wandered through the room containing the examples of Zhou dynasty bronzework. There a ritual vessel, and there a mirror, still bright after three thousand years, and here a bronze _bi_, and there a …

She paused, then hurried past that one.

There was, she knew, no accounting for taste in art, and no doubt everything held some special meaning to someone. But the creator and appreciators of that particular piece, she felt, would have to have inhaled several kilograms of certain illegal recreation substances before attaining the appropriate mindset.

It was a presumed representation of the human form in bronze. But the piece's body and limbs were withered and shrunken, like those of a spindly corpse. And the eyes on the face … Jun shuddered. No sculpture should be able to stare out at the world with that much intensity. Or madness. The insanity behind the thing's gaze went beyond a mere interpretation of its properties by professional art historians and became something almost tangible, radiating out and unsettling visitors.

Once or twice, Jun had considered getting rid of the cursed thing. Nothing healthy could have produced it, nothing healthy could like it. But her professionalism had quashed the urge, and so the figure remained. But it was still not something you wanted to bump into in the dead of night.

She walked out of the room, and was in the arched door frame, pondering between Ming dynasty paintings or Sui dynasty stoneware, when there was a noise from behind her.

She turned, expecting to see one of the security staff on patrol. She saw nobody in the room.

Something in the ventilation, she thought and moved on. Once again, there was a noise from behind her, a dry hiss.

She swivelled around more quickly this time, her nerves on edge. Once again, there was nothing.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the bronze figure was missing.

Jun wouldn't have described herself as religious, religion being discouraged by the ruling party. But this didn't stop a terrible dread crawling up her spine, at the thought of whatever the statue could be loose in the...

+**Turn,**+ seared its way into her mind, jerking her around automatically to meet the eyes of Ithaqua the Wind Walker.

The insanity that embraced her mind a scant few seconds later came as a relief, leaving her at peace with her surroundings. She didn't notice or move when the pale corpse with mad red eyes moved away. She didn't notice the screams and deaths of the remaining staff.

She didn't notice when the museum began to burn around her.

* * *

_In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waited dreaming. _

The vessel had the inauspicious name of the _Lucky Star_. Its location was the South Pacific. Its captain was the billionaire Graham Torres, one of the most prominent and richest environmentalists in the world. The vessel was his pride and joy, as he was eagerly explaining to the camera pointed at him.

"The thing about the _Lucky Star_," Torres said as passengers bathed on the sundeck and dived off the sides, whooping and cheering in the fresh water of the Pacific, "Is that the funding that's gone into this has gone towards making it the most green boat in history." He then began gesticulating at specific sections of the boat, his enthusiasm growing. "We've installed solar panels in the roof, there's machinery under the boat that generate electricity as it moves, wind turbines instead of masts. There is literally not a single drop of fuel on this boat, nothing that has to be burned to keep it powered."

"What do you plan to do with the _Lucky Star_?" said the young lady with the microphone to the side of the camera.

"Copy it, of course! I want this to set the benchmark for boats everywhere, and I plan to set up a new cruise company to reinforce this, composed entirely of _Lucky Stars_, offering cruises that anyone can afford."

_In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu stirred._

"I want as many people as possible to take a _Lucky Star_ out to these waters," continued Torres, turning sweeping his hand across the blue horizon. "Not just to show a new commitment to green travel, but to just take in the sights and beauty and wildlife of this part of the world. I mean, there's so many beautiful, wonderful, unique creature out there that most people will never see apart from on the TV or on the internet. I want to change that. I want people to experience nature at close hand."

_From his house at R'lyeh, Cthulhu pushed up through the darkest waters at the bottom of the world._

After a few minutes more of discussion about the Lucky Star Cruise Company, a man who had been monitoring sonar in the office in the cabin atop the Lucky Star approached Torres and had a brief, hushed conversation.

"Did you get that?" said Torres as he turned back to the camera, his face aglow with excitement. "There's something big coming up on our right, a whale or something."

"Er..." said the sonar operator, ignored by the excited captain.

_Freed from his house at R'lyeh, Cthulhu neared the surface._

"Come on, come on, bring that camera over here," said Torres, ushering the media crew over nearer the side. "This is something everyone at home's gonna want to see..."

* * *

It was evening in Providence.

Lovecraft waited with anticipation for the evening meal. One last sumptuous meal in the house (the kitchen and dining room were situated at the back rather than the front, fortunately), before his real work began across the world.

Now it was time to take the fight to the Outer Realms, instead of reacting to whatever monsters moved across from it. He would have to convince those in power of the existence and severity of the threat before anything real could be done, but what the hell, he hadn't spent years garnering evidence about the Outer Realms and cultivating contacts in governments worldwide for nothing. Give him but a few weeks, and the Outer Realms would learn to fear humanity...

The appearance of dinner broke him out of his happy thoughts, and replaced them with new happy thoughts. A huge bowl of spaghetti in the Bolognese fashion. Golden oily coils and sauce coated his plate, with a delectable aroma that almost, but not quite, outdid the taste. Heaven.

His gaze drifted across the table, until he sighted the person nearest what he desired to complete the meal.

"Coraline, my dear," he began, "I wonder if you would be so kind as to pass the pa..."

He stopped there. His eyes narrowed as something crept up upon his mind...

...And exploded with the force of a lightning storm. He cried out in horror and fell backwards, and others streamed from the table, yelling and offering aid. He ignored them, blind and deaf to all except the things shrieking across his mind.

"Get his pills," roared Abra through a storm of sound and screaming, "They usually help!"

"It's them visions again," whispered Lavinia. "Gawd help us."

He bucked and writhed and screamed on the floor, trying to block out the volume of horror flooding into his mind from every direction, his wails echoing a thousand others across the world.

He finally stopped and wheezed for breath on the hard floor. The others looked on in concern, Coraline in fascination and terror.

"That was a bad one, old boy," said Olney. "What was it? What's happening?"

Lovecraft, when he had recovered, managed,

"Oh, _fuck_."


	13. Incursion

"...images show the loss of the vessel with all hands, and the creature that emerged emitted some sort of madness-inducing..."

Bzzp.

"...evacuation of Dublin severely hampered by repeated onslaughts by the smaller creatures..."

Bzzp.

"...death toll estimated at thousands, if not millions, across the whole of..."

Bzzp.

"...rioting in New York..." "...emergency summit in Manhattan by the UN..." "...countless other incursions by these creatures into every country in the world..."

Bzzp, went the remote for the last time, as Wybie turned the small TV off before he threw the remote overarm at the wall for his room. It bounced off and onto the carpet with a morose _thunk_, leaving a dent in the plaster. He paced and fretted, afflicted with the knowledge of what was really going on, which included knowledge of how screwed he was.

The images born of nightmares had swept across the world. A great octopus-headed god rising roaring out of the Pacific, the sea churning with its lesser kin. Hordes of gibbering cultists and demons flooding across St. Peter's Square, Swiss Guard on the steps of the basilica pouring machine gun fire into the oncoming masses. Navies turning swathes of ocean into firestorms in pitched battle against the Great Old Ones. Legions of monsters swarming across China, across the Ural Mountains, Connaught, Texas and Louisiana.

The media devolved into hysteria, the leaders of the world all seemed to be engaged in a competition to best behave like headless chickens, the world had been _shuddered,_ and the most frustrating thing for Wybie was that there wasn't a single damn thing he could do about it.

He'd looked up Lovecraft after they'd returned from Providence, after the murders of Mr and Mrs Jones. He'd been unable to reach out to Coraline, so shocked and withdrawn she had been. With little else he could, he had consulted the internet. Everything had been there. The guy's lifestory was all confirmed, and all his works were available online. Wybie had read them all. You could have counted the number of happy endings on the fingers of one hand of an incompetent yakuza.

And now these beast weren't just gunning for one obscure scholar or expedition, the whole of humanity was in their sights. And nobody was doing _anything_.

There had been fighting, the news showed that at least. Gunfire in concentrated volumes harmed the smaller creatures, but it didn't seem to faze the bigger ones, the Great Old Ones.

What was Lovecraft doing?, wondered Wybie. What was the order doing? Was Coraline with them? So many damn questions, and so few answers.

Well, maybe he could try and make a difference. But how?

He sat on the edge of his bed and thought it through. The order had the power to stop the creatures, or some amount of power at least. Where did that power come from? The one thing that united the diverse order was their knowledge of and experience with the Outer Realms.

Well, there was no disputing that everyone on Earth was about to undergo one hell of an experience with the Outer Realms. But most of them lacked the knowledge, and that would doom them all unless...

...Unless Wybie could come up with one hell of a scheme.

He mulled this last part over, and got up from his bed after a few minutes and made his way downstairs to the livingroom.

His grandma was there, in a plush chair in front of the television, watching the news roll by with a taut expression. Wybie knew that his frustration at feeling helpless had been inherited in large part from her; and he now knew that must have come from her inability to stop her sister being taken by the Beldam.

She turned as he entered, a ghost of a smile flitting across her face. The firm tone and strict attitude she had towards her grandson masked a deep unconditional love. He was all she had left to her, after her son and his wife had died in that three-car pileup on the motorway out of Portland. She had sworn to raise him right, and in spite of (or because of) his peculiarities, she was inclined to think she had done a good job so far.

"What is it, Wybourne?" she said, steadfastly refusing to call him "Wybie", being opposed to nicknames on principle.

"Well, you know that trip to Rhode Island I took about a week back?" he began, scratching the back of his head in nervous anticipation.

"Sure."

"Actually, scratch that. Remember all that stuff Coraline told you about the Pink Palace?"

Her inquiring look took on a more distant character. "Uh huh."

"Well..." said Wybie, launching into a narrative that would take two hours to go through completely.

He would impart the knowledge by one person at a time, if he had to. If his plan didn't work.

* * *

Coraline had organised her possessions on the bed, and checked them and equipped them one by one.

Her hat went on her head. There it would remain.

A flashlight, a heavy silver one with a clasp on the end on loan from Titus, went to dangle from one of the belt loops on her jeans.

A small jar of Kadath sand went into a pocket.

The sword formerly in Gautreau's possession, and gifted to her by Lovecraft, was slung onto her back, the silver bell hilt poking into the back of her head. She knew there was a fine art to using such swords, but it was one she didn't possess, so her plan was to poke the sharp end at an enemy and hope for the best.

A compact, snub-nosed pistol went into her satchel, along with other miscellaneous items, like a pair of pliers, several military-issue ration bars, ammunition for the pistol, a toothbrush, and an empty thermos.

The sudden packing had been necessary, and had been ordered by Lovecraft of everyone in the order. He needed no newspapers or 24-hour news channels to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and neither did anyone else in the order.

He had taken Coraline aside as the order stirred and bustled around the house, and had said "Change of plans, I'm afraid. It will be too risky to take you with me to Washington. Miss Alhazred and Thomas Olney will be travelling to the West Coast, and you'll go with them. No, no arguments," he said as Coraline opened her mouth to object. "It won't be as dangerous up in Oregon. The Outer Realms don't have a great established presence there. Besides, your neighbours will need you assistance if they are to survive."

"I fear your planned training under the order won't come to pass," he continued, "The coming times shall either see humanity or the Outer Realms broken for ever. Either way, the order will soon become redundant." And as he swept away into the busy order members, his face had been alive with a terrible eagerness, his eyes burning with the fires of the Outer Realms.

Coraline, there and then, knew what she had to do. She had withdrawn upstairs to her room, and laid out her possessions for packing. There was just one item left to pack away, but she had a use for it.

The skeleton key, a spare one previously possessed by Lavinia Whateley.

She took it in one hand, gripping it tight, and prowled along the empty corridors to Lovecraft's office.

A few moments jostling and fiddling and swearing sprung the lock open, and Coraline crept inside. She walked through shadows and weedy rays of moonlight to the great oak desk. It had one drawer, which wasn't locked.

Inside nestled a worn leather folder. She opened it and pulled out the thick book within.

The book's cover seemed to be entirely composed of set chips of stone, forming a black-green mosaic. In the centre, on a large flat circle of dark marble, was an engraving of a tower.

The whispering sounded in her mind again, with an undercurrent of mockery, until the resonating timbre from her latest dream of the tower cut through her mind.

**And so, in your exploration, you come to me at last.**

Above the tower was Arabic lettering, which shifted and crawled across Coraline's vision, turning into English. The new letters spelt _Necronomicon_.

**Am I all that you expected? Did you expect some great tome the size of a man, crackling with lightning and power? Did you expect something in black leather, set with skulls and obsidian? Whatever you expected, you will not be satisfied by my contents. You are not the first to have perused me for the purposes of destroying the gods. All others have failed. You shall suffer no other fate.**

She took it and, clenching it under one arm, slammed the drawer shut, and marched briskly out of the room. She ignored it as best she could on the long walk back to her room.

Whatever the cost of the knowledge, she would meet it. She would not permit any other outcome.

* * *

The _USS Tempest_, a destroyer of the Third Fleet, lurched in the frothing dark waters, belching smoke and flames as it was lashed by the storm over the Pacific. It had been part of the attempted evacuation of Hawaii.

Emphasis on "attempted."

"Keep us on a forward course! Increase the speed!" screamed Captain Evans into the microphone leading down to a speaker in the engineering section.

"The engines cannae take it, captain! There's a bloody deil in the...Piss aff, ye pest!" came the retort from Engineer Doohan, along with an insidious hiss from a nightgaunt and the chatter of machine gun fire, which in turn elicited screeches of pain from the nightgaunt.

Evans turned desperately back to the view from the command cabin, to the surging, roaring waters of the Pacific, strewn with flaming debris and burnt corpses, with the hulks of burnt-out ships bobbing on the raging sea.

And beyond, beyond the storm clouds that hung thick and low over the waters, were huge shapes that had accounted for half of the battle group between them. The numberless hordes of smaller creatures had accounted for the other half.

The deck of the _Tempest _was thick with the bodies of nightgaunts and Deep Ones, as well as the bodies of marines, with the survivors spraying the oncoming swarms of nightgaunts with bullets. Streams of yellow-hot lead flew up from the deck in all directions, along with still-eager cries of "_Semper Fi, ya sons of bitches_!" The nightgaunts and Deep Ones had no guns or advanced weaponry, but compensated for this by being utterly relentless, and by bringing millions of their friends with them.

The situation was what is colloquially referred to in military terms as a clusterfuck. But Evans kept the _Tempest_, buffeted by its namesake, pointed on towards the looming monsters.

Their ship's ammunition was in short supply. The marines had taken heavy casualties. There was no avenue of escape. Everything had gone to hell. And for Evans, who could claim some distant strand of genetic code from an ancient Greek sailor, there was only one course of action left on the table.

"Engineer Doohan," barked Evans into the microphone, "Take us to ramming speed."

There was a moments reflective silence before "Whit sort of bloody speed is that, then?" crackled back.

"It's...just go _fast_. Fast as the engines can go." And as Evans sat back into his captains chair and prepared himself for death, the strand of genetic code screamed its approval.

And as the _Tempest_ pushed through the broiling waters, Cthulhu turned from the frigate he had been leisurely dissecting with one flabby claw to behold the destroyer coming to bear upon him.

In this world, he stood taller than buildings, greater than ships, was comparable to mountains. His great scaly form was held up by four rippled limbs, two wings were folded behind his back, the tentacles tangling from his head writhed and lunged at empty air.

He was the high priest of the Outer Gods, the lord of the Great Old Ones, the foe of all humanity, chaos made incarnate.

And he would obey his lord, and see this species purged from the world.

It was a vague source of irritation, however, (inasmuch as Great Old Ones can feel anything akin to irritation, or something comparable to a human emotion) that the species in question were not being at all co-operative, and even had the audacity to fight back. It was patently ludicrous.

But as the destroyer came closer, Cthulhu could not suppress the thought that he'd been here before, he'd encountered this exact situation before...

His body was ungainly on account of its size, but Cthulhu lurched his head to the side just in time to avoid the ship's prow. It still kept moving forward...

...To come crashing upon Dagon, who had been behind Cthulhu and unprepared for the destroyer's impact. It sheared into him, cracking him open as he shuddered screeching backwards. His gargantuan form gushed black ooze where it had been struck, and an array of limbs struck out from it towards the _Tempest_. But the _Tempest_ had turned on its side immediately upon striking Dagon, and poured a full broadside of ship-fire into the wound.

The death-roar of Dagon could be heard in Los Angeles. The flash of eldritch fire could be seen in Micronesia.

The only sound that disturbed the echoes was the sound of Cthulhu bringing one great claw upon the _Tempest_, crushing it beneath the surface. It continued to burn underwater, and wouldn't stop until it hit the abyssal plain.

Cthulhu regarded the erupted form of Dagon in no small alarm. There were thousands of Great Old Ones, true, and he wasn't among the greater of them. But that hadn't been meant to happen. The humans weren't _meant_ to have vessels of that power and momentum to bring to bear.

It was in that moment that Cthulhu, accepting utterly the necessity of the campaign ordained by Nyarlathotep, also began to have the smallest of misgivings about it...

The rains continued to batter down, and the blind ocean swallowed the corpses of humans and gods alike.

* * *

The President paced in the Oval Office, filling the minutes before the motorcade would arrive to take him to Air Force One, which would take him to Manhattan.

His anxious train of thought was interrupted by a buzz from the intercom, and a nervous stammer of "Mr ... Mr President? There's visitors here to meet you. They say it's urgent..."

And before the President could so much as muster a "Who are they?" the door slammed open, and four people marched in, tailed by unsure secretaries and marines. They were elderly, and dressed in dark suits, and moved with the power and determination of panthers.

"Mr President," said the leading one, a tall old man with a long face and deep brown eyes, "I'm pleased to be able to meet with you. Trust me when I say that the matter I bring to you is relevant, if a bit too relevant for my tastes."

"You have the advantage of me, Mr...?" said the President, extending a hand.

"Lovecraft," said the man, "And my companions are Titus Crow, Lavinia Whateley, and Edgar Danforth," he said motioning at the three others, who were insistently shrugging off the security staff.

"And the matter you speak of presumably concerns the global incursion by these...creatures, presumably?" said the President, who was frowning. Not at the strangers, for stranger things had happened in the last day alone, but because the name had stirred something in the President's mental collection of dorky trivia. "Do you mean you have relvant information on them?"

"You could say that. Take a seat, Mr President."


	14. Shambling Flights

It was anyone's guess as to how Lovecraft had acquired a plane. And it was utterly up for debate how he had even greased the sufficient palms to get it airborne, due to the grounding of all civilian flights.

It was relatively small, and was buffeted by the renewed stormwinds as it droned across America. At the front was the pilot's cabin, manned only by Thomas Olney. Behind this was the passenger's quarters, with long yellow sofas at every wall and clear plastic tables along the centre. Miss Alhazred sat at the far front of the quarters, flipping the pages in a sheaf of documents with one hand, still nursing her broken arm. Coraline stood a few feet away from her on one of the few clear areas of floor, practising with the rapier. Olney's disembodied soul sat at the far end next to the closed door leading to the luggage quarter, flicking through a magazine with some invisible prehensile limb.

There was no speaking, and no noise beyond the growl of the engines, the whisper of the storm, the rustling of paper, and the occasional swish from the rapier.

"Keep a tighter grip on it," said Miss Alhazred, after an inadvertently-released sword almost skewered her leg. "It's a weapon of war, not a darning needle," and here Coraline couldn't suppress a shiver.

"Any tips?" said Coraline as she prised the sword loose from the sofa and took a firmer grip on it. Miss Alhazred put the papers down and frowned, deep in thought.

"I'm not an expert, but here's a few things I picked up. Don't try anything you might have seen from Errol Flynn or Zorro films. Those fights are made to look good on camera. That's not what you're trying to do. Keep the sword moving, and keep moving quickly. Go for vulnerable regions, like the throat, the eyes, the groin, places that will hurt a lot and bleed a lot."

Coraline, a little uncertainly, stabbed at the groin of an invisible enemy in front of her.

"That's the spirit. You should also ask Olney for advice when we touch down. He's better with knives than swords, but he might have a few extra tips-"

The training was interrupted by a sudden ripple of turbulence, shaking the plane in midair and almost making Coraline fall over.

"Christ alive, that was a bad one," said Miss Alhazred. "Are you okay, Coraline?"

"I'm okay," said Coraline, as the plane's communication system crackled to life.

"That wasn't an air pocket that did that," came Olney's nervous voice. "Something else caused that little bump there."

"What?" said Miss Alhazred, suddenly alert, her good hand flying to a pistol at her side. "Are you sure?" she yelled up to the intercom.

"Certain. These systems could detect a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, and there weren't any disturbances before us. Something's attacking us."

The words rung in the quarters for a few long moments. Coraline grasped the rapier with both hands and Miss Alhazred drew the pistol and flicked off the safety. From the other end, there was the faint rustle of Olney's soul standing.

There was also a faint rustle from the end of the quarters, beyond the door leading to the luggage. The sound of rummaging, of cases being overturned and bags being emptied, also crawled out, as well as a eerie high-pitched chatter.

"_Where is it, where is it, it sings to us, where is it, must be found, it sings to us with music of the stars, must be found..._"

Miss Alhazred leveled the pistol at the door, and motioned Coraline forwards. Breathing out, she tiptoed to the door, with a dull, sneaking suspicion as to what the creature beyond was looking for. Olney's soul padded along next to her, whispering words of encouragement and confidence.

She held the rapier in her left hand, and gripped the door handle with her right. She steadied herself. How horrible could it be, compared to what she had already seen.

She swung it open. Inside, she saw something that vaguely resembled a naked wrinkled chimpanzee, squatting amidst the discarded luggage. It paused guiltily, and look up at Coraline with burning golden eyes.

"Dimensional Shambler," murmured Olney's soul. "Step back. Leave it to..."

"_Thieves, usurpers, heretics, scum,_" shrieked the creature, leaping upright and suddenly resembling a gorilla more than a chimp. Its mouth flashed open, revealing ivory-white teeth as long and pointed as knives. Sparks shot out of its eyes.

"Get back," whispered the soul urgently, but the creature knuckled forwards and vanished with a crack and flash of eldritch flame.

Coraline stumbled back, , but there was now another crack and flash behind her, and she suddenly backed into something. She swivelled around, the sword at the ready, and a hairless gray fist swung up into her jaw.

Fireworks exploded in her skull as she reeled back and collapsed against the wall. Through a blur, she saw the creature grappling with something unseen, swaying back and forth and shuddering as shots from Miss Alhazred's pistol lashed into its back. Its jaw opened and its teeth dashed out and into an invisible throat, shaking and worrying at it violently.

Coraline pulled herself up unsteadily, as the creature threw away Olney's ravaged soul (the plane, she couldn't help but note, was beginning to sway alarmingly in the air) and vanished with another crack and flash. It reappeared over Miss Alhazred, dangling by one hand from a luggage rack, its mouth open and teeth bared. As it reached down with one huge hand for Miss Alhazred's head, it received a full clip from the pistol to its face for its trouble, and vanished with a flash, a crack, and a shriek of pain and fury.

As it reappeared to the left of Coraline, Coraline had a firm grip on the rapier and had the flashlight gripped in her right hand. She whipped her hand around and sent the flashlight clattering against the wall behind the creature. It automatically span its hairless head around to find the source of the noise, having an animal's instincts at heart. Realising the trick almost at once, it turned back around, and met Coraline's blade head first.

The thrust blade slashed across both its eyes, and as it yowled in pain, Coraline pulled the sword down and around and into the thing's groin.

It vanished with a crack and a flash, and reappeared outside the plane, staring in through one of the windows. It screeched something foul, lost to the howling winds, and sprang back from the plane's side.

The descending flashes of fire, down into the broiling dark storm clouds, marked its return to earth.

"Are you hurt, Coraline?" Miss Alhazred said with urgency. She had remained seated for the entire battle.

"I … no, I'm not." stammered Coraline. She felt she ought to start keeping a tally of this sort of thing. "What the hell was that thing?"

"A Dimensional Shambler. Cunning, cowardly, capable of short-distance teleportation. No end of fun." She turned back to the intercom. "Are you okay, Olney."

"Well, hitherto, I'd imagined that scars across the soul were entirely metaphorical," came the irascible reply, "But I'm okay, I'll live. How did that thing find us? They're skilled trackers, but they're not _that_ good."

"There...there must be something aboard the plane. Something powerful, that's calling out to it. It'll attract others, whatever it is. But what could it be? Is it one of us? Something we brought with us?"

Coraline kept her silence. If whatever the Necronomicon held was powerful to call down this sort of attention, then it had to be the answer to ending this war. It _had_ to be.

* * *

"No, no, no, that's not how you hold a gun, no – look just hand it over. Look, you – hey! Stop running with that! You could set it off. Put it down. _ Put it down_. There. Now if we can all just line up, please. Please? Look, I'm trying to mould you all into a fearsome fighting force, and you're not helping … I told you to put it down!"

In a sun-dappled clearing in a red-gold forest in a crisp midday, Lieutenant Harsimran Pargat fought the urge to have a nervous breakdown right there and then.

Oh, he had been so bright and proud that day two months ago, when he had graduated from West Point with dozens of other newly-minted officers. He had been giddy on his own triumph, his mind flaring up images of battle, of promotion, of him doing his country proud by defending its people and interests at home and abroad.

And then, these goddamned demons had started popping out of the woodwork, and everything was utter chaos, and he had been assigned to training the Ashland branch of the reserve militia, and he had been saddled with a bunch of incompetent civilians who wouldn't recognise a rifle if you cracked one over their skull, and no part of the situation was fair in the _slightest_.

You couldn't make proper soldiers in a couple of days from a mob, Pargat knew all too well. You couldn't rely on a gentle-natured lieutenant trying to be firm but fair about the whole business. You needed pushups at dawn, and staff sergeants screaming into your ears, and rigorous mental training upon gruelling physical training for months on end, until you had something usable.

"Okay, look, let's take a break," he said, waving his arms to get everyone's attention. "We'll take a five-minute break, and then, and then we'll return to the firearms, okay?"

As he stumbled away from the civvies into some shade, he couldn't help but recall a certain marine officer cadet he had met during a visit to Annapolis to the US Naval Academy. The prick had been actively living up to all the stereotypes: he was loud, brash, boisterous, driven, and had cemented himself as a moron in Pargat's estimation.

And the worst thing, Pargat knew as he ground his teeth together, the bastard would be laughing his head off if he saw Pargat now.

Approaching shadows along the forest path broke Pargat out of his momentary blue screen of death. He stood up straight, showing off all the buttons on his uniform, and announced,

"This area has been reserved for training purposes by the Reserve Militia. I'm going to have to ask you to...to..." and his attention drifted as he took the group in.

At the front was a (presumed) child, wearing a heavy black coat and and a mask that looked like the love-child of the grim reaper and Sam Fisher's headgear. Behind him, an elderly black woman wrapped in a shawl and red scarf strode forward with the aid of a stick. Behind them, two other old ladies, one of them short and stout and wielding a walker, and the other tall and wielding a terrifyingly large bosom. They seemed to be engaged in a furious argument.

"...your gammy legs will give you no end of grief for this, April, you mark my words."

"Miriam, you aren't still going on about this, are you? Besides, your..."

And behind them was the tallest man Pargat had ever seen, who had dressed himself in a vest and gym-shorts. Oh, and he was _blue_.

Some tiny thread of sanity that Pargat had been vainly trying to maintain snapped, and freed him just like that. He swept forward to meet this group.

"Do you have a minute to spare, captain?" said the boy at the front.

"Between you and me," said Parget, "The rate at which the trainings going, I'd be as well giving you a year." He turned back to the milling militia, and then back to the boy.

"What do you want? In spite of appearances, we're exceedingly busy."

"I've got information about the creatures rampaging across the world. Information which could save us all, if I can give it to people with power. You have weapons. Therefore, you have power, and can help save the world."

Lieutenant Pargat opened his mouth. He then closed it. He opened it again.

"Go on," he said.

* * *

The President sat at his chair behind the desk in the Oval Office, the echoes of Lovecraft's tale dying as he thought. His brow was furrowed and his eyes stared at a knot in the wood of the desk.

"This is a lot you're asking me to believe, Mr Lovecraft," he managed, after some time.

"I understand that. But it is vital that you do."

"This organisation you claim to represent...how many of you are there?"

"About five dozen."

"That's pretty small."

"Our membership is restricted to those who have had contact with the Outer Realms." Lovecraft smiled, a grim smile. "I believe our membership could now be reasonably expanded to the entire population of Earth."

As he thought about it, the President suddenly realised where he had heard the name "Lovecraft" before. When he had been at a university in New York, one of his friends had tossed a small book into his lap, insisting that he would like one of the stories in it, "The Call of Cthulhu." He had read it and had been unimpressed by the overwrought prose and mild racism. But something had stuck with him after he had read it. A sense of overwhelming cosmic horror, a sense of insignificance amidst "black seas of infinity." And the creature described within bore some resemblance to the one that was...

He shook away the memory, and turned back to Lovecraft.

"I appreciate you coming to me, Mr Lovecraft, and I appreciate that you earnestly believe that you can help."

"Your tone and words suggest otherwise."

"Let me be clear," said the President, his voice cold and firm. "For every earth-shattering event, there have always been doomsayers and cults cropping up across the globe. They have never been right before, the world didn't end on the turn of the millennium, the Illuminati have thus far failed to rise, nothing they have predicted has become true. How do I know your group isn't one of these cults? That all this really is "foreordained" or anticipated by one of your past leaders? I won't deny, I can't deny, that what is happening to our world in unprecedented. But we will overcome it with sufficient power and planning. The last thing the world's leaders need to do is listen to a group coming from nowhere and claiming that they alone can stop this incursion if they're given absolute authority."

"Can I then infer," said Lovecraft, his voice flat, "That you will not accept my help?"

"You're correct. I have no reason to accept that the evidence you present refers to the creatures attacking us. I don't even have any reason to believe you really are Lovecraft. There is too much at stake here to place our faith into the hands of an unknown few. And I'm going to have to ask you to leave. I have to leave for the conference in Manhattan in a few minutes." The President motioned at the secret service agents at the door. "Wallace, Lamort, please escort these people out, as gently as possible."

"Is that your final answer?" asked Lovecraft, his hand stealthily sliding down to his right pocket.

"Yes."

"Ah. A pity," said Lovecraft, silently cursing. He had hoped it wouldn't come to this, but he had prepared regardless. He gave the slightest of nods, and out of the corner of his vision, he saw Titus and Lavinia tense.

As one of the agents put a large hand on Lovecraft's shoulder, he span around, drawing the small, sharpened sliver of wood of his pocket, and slashed it up along the agent's cheek. The man gasped with pain, and let all the air out of his lungs in one astonished heave when one of Lovecraft's fists slammed out and into him, sending the agent flying across the room and smashing into a cabinet. The paralytic on the tip of the splinter coursed through the agent's bloodstream, and he stayed down.

The other agent's hand blurred into her suit jacket for her pistol, but Titus's fist loomed into her field of vision. His other hand seized the back of her head and slammed it forward onto the fist. The two connected with a dull thud, and the agent fell from his grasp to the floor.

The President started forward, but Lavinia's hand seized his throat, and held him helpless in a grip as unyielding as an iron bar.

"Danforth. Keep guard," barked Lovecraft, and the shortest of the group rushed to the door and stood at attention before it. Behind the closed door were the sounds of shouting and rushing feet. The President's view of it was suddenly blocked by Lovecraft looming before him. The man's right hand's fingers began to dance, increasing in speed, blurring and snapping before the President's eyes.

"What do you think you're doing?" managed the President through a severely compressed throat. "Kill me and to hell with you, but you'll never get heard by the United Nations..."

"I know," interrupted Lovecraft sadly, and it could have been just the President's imagination, but was there green _fire_ leaping between his flickering fingers? "I will regret what I am about to do, for what consolation that is. But we must all sacrifice something in times of need. Pray that it shall ultimately be only this precept of my morality."

"I hope you know what yer dewin'," hissed Lavinia to Lovecraft, his hand now definitely blazing with otherworldly fire.

"I do," he said simply. "The world needs us, now more than ever."

And as the President opened his mouth to shout some last defiance, and as Lavinia's grip tightened, and as the door burst open and security flooded in to be met by Danforth wielding a chair, Lovecraft's flaming hand struck down and gripped the face of the President.

Whatever escaped of the tortured scream that erupted from the President's throat through the closed windows was drowned out by a crack of lightning.


	15. Retaliation

The air in the chamber was thick with fear, anticipation, and stale sweat.

Assorted clumps of kings, prime ministers, presidents, and generalissimo milled and fretted in the main chamber of the UN Headquarters in Manhattan. The high brown walls of the chamber and the harsh overhead lighting bathed the assembly in a grim orange light. The countless hushed conversations that rolled across the room weren't enough to dull the distant sounds of gunfire and explosions from the city without.

Every so often, a new figure would join the assembled heads of humanity, making their way past the bodyguards of a hundred different nations, who, being on nerves and having nothing better to do, were scrutinising each other. The throng grew by a king here, a chancellor there, until the room was almost full. The Pope was one of the later arrivals, trailing bedraggled Swiss Guard, his robes stained with blood and soot, his brandished sub-machine gun being gently prised from him by one of the security staff.

They were all waiting for the last and most powerful of their number, the one whose nation would inevitably spearhead the military response against these creatures from beyond.

And just as the President of Brazil turned to his Portuguese counterpart and said in hushed tones, "You don't think that the creatures could have gotten to him en route, do y...", the President of the United States entered, grasping a black suitcase, and trailing four old people in shabby black suits.

The President didn't seem entirely his old self in the eyes of those who had known him well, he seemed drained and almost in a trance. He almost stumbled a few times on his route to the podium, but was caught each time by his aged helpers, who also swatted away any other heads of state who approached him.

He reached the podium, and took his place behind the lectern, flanked by the old assistants.

Nobody tried to reassert normal protocol for general assemblies. Nobody was particularly inclined to.

As the President began to speak, nobody could see the hands of one of the old assistants, which were held behind his back and flickering with emerald fire.

The President began slowly and hesitantly, but his voice gathered its old charisma and authority as his speech went on. He spoke of the recent incursions, and of the damage inflicted on too many nations and people. He spoke of the measures already taken by the countries of the world, but said that they would not be enough. With that, he reached for his suitcase, prised it open, and pulled out a stack of papers.

He went through the papers, and told the assembly about the relevant parts of the Outer Realms. Words and phrases like "Great Old One", "Shoggoth", "Refuge of madness", "Unspeakable horrors from beyond the veil of reality", and "Unstoppable purge" floated across the increasingly tense and nervous chamber. It was too early in the morning, as far as most of them were concerned, for phrases like "Inconceivable terrors lurking amidst the stars."

Time ticked by on a large clock at the back of the chamber. He produced evidence of the existence of the creatures beyond, produced accounts of their earlier attacks, built up the fear of the assembly.

And then, he produced a disc from the suitcase, as a hastily-acquired monitor was rolled up behind the lectern. The President slotted the disc into the player, and stood aside to let the video play. It had been pieced together on the flight to Manhattan, from records from Navy camera and overhead planes. It was the _USS Tempest's_ last moments.

Darkness. Crashing waves. The chatter and cackles of nightgaunts. The desperate shouts and gunfire from marines. The looming shadows behind broiling clouds. Moving forward. Impact. The roar of the _Tempest's_ guns. A last explosion. Dagon dying, ripped open and bleeding into the ocean. Static. Darkness.

The President stood before the blank screen, facing the assembly once more.

"These creatures are powerful, there is no doubt of that. But what you saw there was the destruction of one of them by a destroyer of the US Navy. We can fight them. And we can defeat them. All we need is knowledge of how to do so."

"With that, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present Mr Lovecraft." And one of the old assistants cleared his throat and stepped forward, keeping his hands behind his back, a satisfied smirk playing at the edges of his lips.

* * *

It had only taken an hour for Pargat's despair to be supplanted utterly by bemusement.

The boy in the skull-mask had addressed Pargat and the two-dozen or so members of the Reserve Militia, and had even brought along a stack of printouts of stories from the internet, which the two British old ladies had distributed with the air of classroom assistants. He had rolled a large rock over from the woods to make do as a soap-box, and had stood atop it while he spoke about the creatures.

There were only a few interruptions from the Reserve Militia as he spoke, mostly along the lines of "Wait wait wait, you're saying all that horror stuff I read in college was _real_?" or "What the heck does this word here mean?" or "Would holy water work on them? I know where we can get some cheap," or "What if we used _really_ big guns?" as well as the odd "Look, please tell me you're kidding."

After the talk had concluded, Pargat asked the four the boy had brought with him, and who had all presumably been told this beforehand, to divide the militia into four equal teams and to lead a team each. He had then taken the boy aside.

"What is it, captain?"

"Look, kid, I'm glad to know a lot of this, I really am. It'll make fighting these Outer Realms creatures a lot easier. But … oh, and that's "Lieutenant", just so you know … how do you actually know any of this? How did you make the connection between these creatures in the stories and the ones here?"

"I heard about it from a whole order dedicated to fighting them, up in Rhode Island. The guy who wrote these stories leads the order, and he knows nearly everything there is to know about the Outer Realm."

"What's this order of his doing now?"

"I...I don't know. Fighting, probably."

"Is there anyone else around here or whom you can contact who knows anything about this?"

The boy scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. "There was someone else. A girl my age. But she's not … she's..." and his eyes, which had happened to innocently fall on the path leading into the clearing, bugged out in shock, "She's just coming up the path right now excuse me captain gotta go." And with that he rushed towards Coraline, who was accompanied by a puzzled and irritated Miss Alhazred and Olney.

"Wybie!" said Coraline, running forward, throwing down her bag and reaching Wybie in the middle of the path. After a moment's awkward dithering over the proper greeting, and a "to hell with it" moment, they gave each other a quick, friendly hug.

"Where were you? Did the order guys come for you? How did you find us?" came Wybie's first few questions in a breathless rush.

"Yeah, they did, and they took me to that house in Providence. We were driving past, and I saw your grandma's car parked next to the armoured cars, so I suggested we take a look."

"What was it...what happened to your folks? I'm sorry, I shouldn't have..."

"Its...Its okay. Really. One of the Outer Gods happened to them, Nyarlathotep. He tried to kill me as well, but … well, he tried in a house full of order members. He's been banished for a month, according to Howard. We'll be ready for him the next time."

"If there is a next time. Is the order connected with what's been going on?"

"Howard was going to Washington, the last I saw him. Most of the order's scattered across the country, so they can fight everywhere. It's definitely Outer Realms stuff that's been happening, the order was certain of that."

"Ah. How did you get back? I heard all the flights were grounded."

"The order must have friends in high places. We took a ride on a private plane, though we did get attacked by a..."

("Hello," said Miss Alhazred, sweeping past and offering a hand to Lieutenant Pargat. "I take it you're the responsible adult here?"

"Much as I wish otherwise," said the lieutenant, shaking the proffered hand.)

Stories unfolded and introductions were exchanged. Miss Alhazred questioned Wybie for a time, and then dragged Olney away to help give some more pointers to the militia, most of whom were currently engaged in target shooting across the clearing. Wybie and Coraline shared the rock.

"You told Miss Spink and Forcible and Mr Bobinsky about all this? And your grandma?"

"Yeah, I figured that the more people knew about this, the better. And I thought that the military cold use the info, if they didn't have it already. Did Howard tell you what he was doing in Washington, exactly?"

"Not exactly, but I guess it would be something to do with the President. But if you've got a group of people here that you're training to fight the Outer Realms..." and here her voice trailed off.

"Er, yes?"

"Then that's _perfect_!" she exclaimed, her eyes flashing with excitement. "Look what I picked up at the Pink Palace." With that, she reached into her satchel and drew out a worn leather folder. She opened it, and pulled out a book with a dark cover.

Wybie looked at it. "What is...?" he began, and concluded "...Oh, gods, you can't be serious," as the lettering on the cover rearranged itself.

"I'm as serious as can be."

"Howard gave you a copy of the _Necronomicon_?"

"No, I took it. And keep your voice dow..."

"YOU STOLE A COPY OF THE _NECRONOMICON_!" yelled Wybie, drawing stares from across the clearing and a pair of startled looks from Miss Alhazred and Olney. Miss Alhazred waved Olney down and then echoed Wybie.

"Dammit, Miss Alhazred wasn't meant to know, Why-were-you-born..."

"YOU STOLE THE PYSCHO-BOOK THAT WILL DRIVE YOU INSANE IF YOU SO MUCH AS READ IT, WHICH EVEN LOVECRAFT DIDN'T WANT TO READ TOO MUCH OF, AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH IT!"

"I was planning on reading it."

Wybie gibbered to himself long enough for Miss Alhazred to arrive at a brisk jog from across the clearing.

There was no preamble, no requests for clarification, no time-wasting. "You should not have brought that here," snapped Miss Alhazred, reaching out a hand for the book. "Why did you even take it?"

"Because it has the details on how to kill the Outer Gods," said Coraline, holding the book closer to her, "And because the order was doing nothing with it. It needed to be read, and you were doing nothing."

"We were not doing nothing. And you have placed all of us at serious risk..."

"Look around!" exploded Coraline, dropping the _Necronomicon_ into Wybie's lap as she leapt up and locked gazes with Miss Alhazred. "We're already "at serious risk"! The Outer Realms are invading earth, and I saw the news reports! I know how badly we're doing! And I know that none of the order was planning anything with the _Necronomicon._ You had all finished your packing, and you'd left the Necronomicon to rot in a drawer. You'd given up on it." Her tone became flatter, and quieter, but it lost none of its fury. "I told Howard I'd read it myself, and I'm going to. The order can help hold the line against the Outer Realms, and I'll take them down once I've finished the book."

"And if it drives you insane?"

"Well," said Coraline, "I've taken bigger risks."

Miss Alhazred blinked first.

"I shall have to confer with Olney about this," she said coldly.

"You do that," said Coraline, and turned her back on Miss Alhazred until she had gone away.

"One thing I don't get..." said Wybie, still slightly dazed and holding the Necronomicon out with his finger tips as if it were a particularly venomous species of scorpion, "Well, actually, there's several things I'm not getting, but this is one of them; How is me training a group of militia useful for you?"

"This thing draws the attention of the Outer Realms," said Coraline, plucking the book from Wybie's fingertips, "And I can't read it and protect myself at the same time. I need an armed guard. I need your militia, Wybie."

"Are you sure you can read it all the way through?"

"I'm the only one who's going to try," said Coraline with no small amount of resolve, "And I want revenge for my parents."

"When are you going to start?"

"As soon as we get to the Pink Palace."

"Why the Pink Palace?"

"Because it's a big building, and you could station all your militia there. And because it started there." Coraline's face darkened. "It'll end there as well."

The crack and skirl of gunfire drifted up and beyond the tree-tops, into a steadily darkening sky.


	16. Edge of the Abyss

The leaflet began,

_Advice Leaflet 1-A_

_International Commission for Earth's Defence_

_Public Security Sector_

_UN Headquarters_

_Manhattan_

_New York_

_Tel. 212-963-6842/7234  
Fax 212-963-6914/2819 _

_Procedures Enacted to Safeguard Against the Outer Realms_

_The following public safety measures, in accordance with PL 111-13 (The Global Threshold Act of 2009) will take effect as of October 1st, and are to be obeyed utterly by all loyal citizens._

_Martial law shall be imposed, in order to maintain order and security and to provide essential services for the duration of the Outer Realms Incursion. This shall include the extension of military law and military justice to all citizens, and must also require the suspension of previously held civil rights (Please view page 3 for a full list of suspended rights)._

_Curfews shall be imposed from 2000 to 0600, in order to curtail the activities of cults and to reduce the danger posed to non-combatants. This curfew shall not apply to those in vital professions (Please view page 2 for a full list of professions deemed vital). Violating curfew shall be considered a criminal offence._

_All citizens are urged to remain vigilant and to immediately report any unusual behaviour exhibited by their neighbours and/or family, which could be a sign of cult behaviour or possession by an Outer Realms creature. Any suspicious behaviour must be reported to your nearest armed services official. Being a cultist, or failing to inform on one, shall be considered an act of treason._

_Any citizens between the ages of 18 and 60, who are not existing members of the armed services, do not suffer from a recognised incapacitating medical condition, or do not hold a vital profession, must register with their nearest armed services official, and must be prepared to be drafted into service at any point for the duration of the Outer Realms Incursion._

_Personal Safety Advice_

_Should you come into contact with any Outer Realms creature, follow the procedures outlined below._

_Engaging the creature in combat must only be done as a last resort. ALL OUTER REALMS CREATURES ARE TO BE CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS AND POSE A SEVERE RISK TO PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH. Citizens making contact with any creature must make their way to their nearest members of the armed services as quickly as possible, and to let them deal with the creature._

_Should escape prove impossible, then combat should only be attempted with a firearm or similar long-ranged weapon from an appropriate distance. Try not to look to closely at the creature, as this can damage your mental health._

_Should looking at the creature prove necessary, then __**do not**__ make eye contact with it._

_Familiarise yourself with the following list, with details and images, of Outer Realms creatures._

And this particular leaflet ended there, on the top half of a out-of-focus shot of a nightgaunt. The rest of the leaflet was burned away, flakes of ash-grey paper fluttering off in the harsh breeze that tossed the leaflet about in the air.

Behind it, the house at Providence burned, sheets of flame and smoke billowing up into a sky already turned black from the thousand other fires across Providence. The walls were ripped open, with burning wood and plaster and tiles littering the once-immaculate lawn. The doors had been smashed in, the roof had been torn off, and what remained of the blazing skeleton of the house was rocked by the occasional explosion from within, as the fire discovered some of the remaining arcane equipment of the order.

The streets around the house were choked by the bodies of civilians and cultists alike, and the gutters were overflowing with blood. Rising above them, on the house's scarred lawn, was the body of John Legrasse, surrounded by the corpses of cultists and the recumbent form of a dead shoggoth.

Titus lay on the white stone porch, his blood smearing the white marble, his cane snapped in two, a satchel next to him on the stone. He held his guts in with one hand and pushed himself up with the other, raising his head up to meet the gaze of Hastur.

The twisted steel crown atop Hastur's yellow hood gleamed red and orange, reflecting the surrounding fires. Emptiness stared back at Titus's pale green eyes.

Beside Hastur stood a young, strongly-built cultist in combat gear dyed red. His hair was flaxen-yellow, one of his eyes was a bright blue, the other was covered with a patch. The Brethren of the Sundered Gaze were a large and wide-spread cult across the continental United States, and were valued by the Great Old Ones for their loyalty, blood-thirstiness, and access to human weaponry. Besides which, any cult that required their members to gouge out their left eye with a claw hammer as part of their initiation was at least _trying_.

"He resists, lord," whispered the young man. "Shall I scourge him?"

+_leave us,_+ ordered Hastur. +_i shall break this one myself._+

The cultist strode away, to continue the slaughter that was still ongoing in Providence, leaving the King in Yellow and Titus alone beneath the blazing house.

+_your order is broken, such as it was. your members across the south and south-east put up a spirited fight, but they died regardless. your leader cowers behind armed guards in new york, your headquarters has been destroyed, and what remains of your order will not be able to stop us. none of humanity can._+

Hastur bent down. +_but tell me where the _Necronomicon_ is, and no more shall have to die. It was not here, though it left a strong signal. tell me exactly where it is, and this whole affair can end._+

"Holy hells," spat Titus, "I think I preferred that shoggoth there to you. At least it didn't gab off as much."

+_you persist in making this worse for yourself, ape. tell me where i can find the _Necronomicon_._+

"You're the most arrogant son-of-a-bitch I've ever met," snarled Titus, spitting blood as he spoke. "Threatening me, thinking you can lie to me, pretending to hold the world hostage. You've seen nothing of what we can do."

He grabbed for the satchel, ripping it open and removing a small device from it. It was a shell about the size of a loaf of bread, with a shiny steel coating and a small control panel on one side.

+_and how do you imagine … whatever that is ... will help you?_+

"This? Borrowed it from an army base in 1975, and kept it for a rainy day ever since," chuckled Titus, hefting it with both arms. "It's a W48. A little tactical nuclear weapon, meant to be used as an artillery shell. Thirty-three inches long, weighs a hundred and eighteen pounds, and has an explosive yield round about point-zero-seven-two kilotons. Not much, but enough."

+_what?_+

Click.

Boom.

Some will say, of course, that 0.072 kilotons is minute compared to something from a conventional nuclear weapon like, for example, 15 kilotons. At a distance of two feet, this is entirely academic.

The house and everything around it, including a large chunk of northern Providence, vanished in a flash of light and fire.

The debris began raining down a few moments later, some of which was the rags and tatters of a patched yellow cloak.

* * *

Miss Alhazred hesitated as she raised one finger over the number pad for her phone.

Howard's distrust for internet-based communication also came with a smaller distrust for phones and similar devices. He firmly instructed all members of the order to use them only in an emergency or if they had uncovered some vital piece of information, and to otherwise stick to letters. And on no account were they even to consider the possibility of e-mail.

But what the hell, she decided, as she tapped in the number for Howard's own seldom used mobile phone. No more harm could be done by it than already happened, and if the theft of the _Necronomicon_ didn't count as an emergency, what could?

The phone rung for a a few seconds before she got a response.

"...this how you work this thing? Oh, here we go. Who is this?"

"Howard, this is Abra."

"Good to hear from you, my dear. How's Oregon faring?"

"Reasonably intact, but that isn't why I phoned."

"What's the problem?"

Best to just say it, as clearly and directly as possible. "Coraline stole your copy of the _Necronomicon_."

There was a short interlude, consisting of an uneasy silence. Then, "She what? She...why?"

"She thinks we weren't making enough progress with reading it. She's planning to read it herself."

"And she's got it with her, in Oregon? Have you tried to retrieve it?"

"No, and there's two reasons. One, she refuses to give it up, and she's got the backing of a friend who has a whole section of some regional guard hanging on his every word. And secondly, I think she might be right, Howard."

"Why do you think that?"

"We hadn't made much progress on it, not nearly as much we should. We'd uncovered maybe, at most, a tenth part of its secrets, and those were the most basic secrets at that. We don't have much of a time-frame now for careful reading of selected segments, and we can't spare anyone from the order to read it now."

"I've increased our time..."

"Yes, yes, I saw your leaflet. You've certainly got the world's governments by the balls, but that won't do you much good. You know as well as I do that Nyarlathotep can resurface if the Great Old Ones don't finish with humanity first, and that he can call upon something like Yog-Sothoth to finish the job. How will you fight an Outer God in all its power, Howard?"

Silence.

"Right. You don't know how. But if Coraline succeeds on this last gamble, then we can win this war forever and always."

"She won't succeed. You know yourself that your ancestors had a go at the thing, and not one of them succeeded. All the _Necronomicon_ in Coraline's hands will do is call some of the Great Old Ones over to her. Do you imagine they'll be merciful?"

"So what do you suggest?"

"Get yourself and Olney out of there, and take the _Necronomicon_ with you. I don't want to know what the Outer Gods could do with it if it fell into their grasp. Leave Oregon undefended if necessary, but you must..."

"You're not listening to me, Howard. We can't win this war, not without the _Necronomicon_'s knowledge. All we can do is let Coraline read it. If she fails, we're in no worse a position than we were in before. If she succeeds, then we've won. How can I put it plainer than that?"

"The Outer Realms won't just stand by and let her read it."

"Right. Which brings me on to my second point."

"Which is?"

"The rag-tag militia here won't be enough to guard Coraline in the event of an attack. I want you to send us troops to defend the house where Coraline will doing her reading. Marines, national guard, whatever you have in the region."

"Certainly not. All of the armed forces are needed for combat or to safeguard the cities."

"Yes, it was a very interesting leaflet. Curfews? Martial law? You're behaving like a tyrant, Howard."

"You're deluded if you think we could maintain order otherwise. Hard times require hard measures. Once we've won, history will vindicate me."

"Not if there's nothing left to do the vindicating. Will you send us some soldiers or not?"

"No. And what's more, I'm _ordering_ you and Olney to retrieve the _Necronomicon_ and to make your own way to New York. The order is too important to waste in Oregon."

"You'd sacrifice an entire state to the Outer Realms? Just like you sacrificed Houston, Nanjing, and St Petersburg?" said Miss Alhazred, her tone now hard and cold.

"What are you..."

"I saw the images on the news a few nights ago. Mushroom clouds tend to leave an impression. You ordered the strikes on these cities, Howard, and don't you dare deny it."

"For god's sake, Abra!" yelled Lovecraft down the line, "They were already overrun! The civilians were in a damn minority in each of these places after the Great Old Ones and cultists had come marching down the streets! I made my choices, I all but destroyed their presence in western Russia with one damn stroke, and I'll sleep easy tonight! _Now, will you kindly obey my orders and take yourself to Manhattan?_"

"No."

"Then you are henceforth..."

"I'm doing the right thing, Howard. You seem to have forgotten how to do so."

Miss Alhazred stopped the call with one furious stab of a finger. And both parties at either end of the call slumped down into their chairs with a irate "Damn them."

"No luck, I take it?" said Olney, who was seated across from Miss Alhazred in the kitchen of the Pink Palace.

"No. Turns out we're doing this on our own."

"Well, look on the bright side. We've got the militia on our side."

They shared a brief, sardonic laugh at that. Yesterday, when the newly-dubbed "Ashland National Guard" had been practising throwing grenades by using potatoes, one of them had been knocked out by a rebounding King Edward. Miss Alhazred and Olney had nothing against one-sided battles. It was just that they preferred them to be one-sided in _their_ favour.

The training session with the potatoes had been one of a few sessions the Ashland National Guard had managed to squeeze in in the past two weeks, in between brushing up on their eldritch lore and fortifying the Pink Palace. And it was a proper fortification now, there was no doubt of that. The surrounding area had been laced with lengths of barbed wire. The hillock on which the Pink Palace had been built had been surrounded with sand bags, on which several machine guns, requisitioned from the military base in Ashland by Lieutenant Pargat, had been mounted to cover all sides of the building. Sniper's nests had been built in the top floor, and most of the rooms inside the building had been reconverted into store rooms for ammunition and supplies. Most of these supplies had been moved using the APC assigned to the Ashland National Guard, a battered old M113 which took a sadistic delight in breaking down at inopportune moments and/or on busy motorways.

Miss Lovat had given her blessing to the refurbishing of the Pink Palace, claiming that "It's mostly only eccentric folks that rent a place there. If it gets through this intact, I bet they'd pay extra for the security." She had also displayed a good aim with one of the sniper rifles while on the practise range, and had volunteered for a place in one of the sniper's nests.

Mr Bobinsky had also proven himself a lucky find, revealing himself to have been in the Soviet Army.

"Is true, was rifleman in Soviet Army before I moved here. Signed up because I was young and bored, and to escape my cruel circus-master of a father. Never actually saw any action, was all waiting and training and marching and looking good for cameras. Not like the Americans at the time, who had gotten themselves in Vietnam. Personally, I think Soviets got better deal there."

"Was part of one operation," he continued, dominating the conversation with Pargat. "Unit was part of the Chernobyl cleanup, near the end of my service. Got a medal as well," he said, proudly tapping the blue-red medal that hung from his vest. "Turned blue as well. Never quite understood that side-effect. But here I am in America now, after dissolution of Soviet Union, and ready and able to fight to defend my new motherland." He had been assigned to a sniper nest as well, as had Miss Spink and Forcible, who, once they stopped arguing with each other and talking to their dogs, proved to be terrifyingly good with rifles.

Wybie had continued to seek out whatever esoteric knowledge the existing works of Lovecraft contained, going through every text in an effort to discover any weaknesses in their enemy, anything the Ashland National Guard could use. This had thus far done nothing but make him even more cynical. He had also moved his motorbike to the Pink Palace, keeping it there in case an emergency necessitated its use. He had also acquired a gun, the same sort of M16 rifle used by the other members.

"The marines, as far as I am concerned, are irredeemable chumps." said Lieutenant Pargat, as he gave Wybie the gun. "But one thing they got right is their Rifleman's Creed. Now repeat after me: "This is my rifle. There are many like it..."

Coraline had started reading. It hadn't been much; a paragraph here, a sentence there, as she was also determined to help set up the Pink Palace. She suspected that once she started reading the _Necronomicon_ seriously, she might not be able to stop.

She had decided to start tonight, on the 4th of October. As Miss Alhazred and Olney finished laughing, Coraline and Wybie marched in.

"What's the joke?" she asked.

Olney started saying "The mili..." before Miss Alhazred kicked him from under the table and said "Just an old jest between us, Coraline. I tried contacting Howard."

"Any luck?" asked Wybie.

"No." She seemed reluctant to discuss it, and Wybie didn't press her.

"Is there anyone else in the area who can help us? Any military units, any order members?" said Coraline.

"Lieutenant Pargat hasn't been able to contact anyone else in the area," answered Olney. "And there's no order members nearby. Pierce and Finnegan are the nearest, and they're tied up in Los Angeles. I tried phoning the headquarters several times, but the lines must be down there. I got no answer."

Coraline was silent for a few minutes, and then stood up and said "No point in wasting time, then, is there? I'll start reading the Necronomicon now."

"What?" said Olney and Wybie, just before Miss Alhazred said "Are you sure? There might still be some people in the area we can recruit."

"No." said Coraline firmly. "We've got all the guards we'll get in the national guard, and they'll have to do the job. I have to start this now."

"Once you've committed yourself, they'll have to start the guard rotation and patrols and … well, everything. If you commit yourself now..."

"...Then less people will die than if I start it tomorrow or some other day while we wait for reinforcements," Coraline interrupted. "There's been too much death already. Too much Outer Realms crap. It has to end. Just give me a few minutes to prepare."

Wordlessly, they left the house, leaving Coraline alone to prepare

First, she made sure the sword was strapped across her back securely, and that her hat was firm on her head. It never hurt to be prepared.

Then, leaving the kitchen, she went through to the study, which still held boxes of catalogues and a dusty Monstrosity. She cleared some room on the desk,making sure there would be enough space for her arms and the _Necronomicon_.

She then went to her parent's bedroom, and after a few minutes, took the photograph of her family at the Detroit Zoo, which had been taken … how lifetimes ago did it seem now? She'd lost count. She took it downstairs and placed on one of the catalogue piles, next to the desk. She might need a reminder.

As she made herself a cup of jasmine tea from Miss Spink and Forcible's own donated stock of tea leaves, she heard the sound of the Ashland National Guard readying itself outside. She heard Pargat's barked commands, the shouting and muted complaining from the guard, the revving of Wybie's motorbike, Miss Spink and Forcible shooing their dogs back inside, Miss Alhazred discussing something with Olney.

How many of them would still be alive when this was over?, she wondered. Could she read the _Necronomicon_ fast enough?

She would have to. She would not allow any other outcome to exist.

She settled down in her father's chair, sipped the steaming tea, and opened the _Necronomicon_.

Two hours later, Wybie poked his head in and began "How are you doing, Jonsey...?" and finished with a strangled sort of "Oh dear." The tea was untouched and cold. Coraline's fingers twitched every so often to turn a page, the only movement from her body. When he walked around the desk and whispered "Coraline?" to try and get her attention, she gave no sign of having heard him or seen him. And in the centre of her pupils, emerald fires sparked and lunged at the void.

Wherever she was, she was now on her own.

Wybie nearly ran back outside to tell Miss Alhazred, and to begin his own watch.


	17. Leading the Way

In the dark maelstrom of the Outer Realms, the avatar of Cthulhu approached Nyarlathotep.

"Speak, most valued of my servants."

His old affability had returned as the purging of earth had continued. His eyes gleamed with reflected fires, his serpentine form coiled and uncoiled as he awaited the moment until he could return to earth, his rictus-expression embraced its natural grin, his every movement hinted at a barely-suppressed eagerness.

Even Cthulhu, the greatest and oldest of the Great Old Ones, was alarmed when Nyarlathotep was in a good mood.

+_**The news I bear is not good, my lord. We have suffered heavy casualties on earth.**_+

Nyarlathotep appeared unruffled. "Oh?"

+_**The humans seem to have lost all inhibitions about using their greatest weaponry on us. More than a hundred Great Old Ones have been destroyed by these atomic weapons, as well as uncounted lesser species. Even in areas where atomics are not being deployed, the humans are putting up a ferocious resistance.**_+

"But they themselves have taken heavy casualties?"

+_**Yes, my lord. By my reckoning, two billion humans have died thus far in the course of our purge, but … our casualties have been greater.**_+

Meeting silence, Cthulhu elaborated. +_**The total dead number three hundred Great Old Ones and several billion servants. Ithaqua and Vushakon were destroyed in Eurasian cities, Y'golonac was killed in Transoxiana, Hastur was felled by an agent of the far-seer's order with a miniature atomic. Our entire vanguard is dead or incapacitated, and the rest of our forces are faring little better.**_+

He paused for a metaphysical breath. +_**We have suffered especially since the far-seer assumed control of much of the world. He is as ruthless and determined as any being of the Outer Realms, and he will pay any price to oust us.**_+

+_**I shall be frank, my lord. If we are to continue the purge without assistance, then we shall run out of servants and Great Old Ones before the fury and weaponry of the humans runs dry.**_+

+_**My lord?**_+

"Worry not, my servant," said Nyarlathotep with a condescending smile. "Things have already been set in motion that should provide a lasting solution."

Cthulhu felt an un-Great Old One-esque urge to seize Nyarlathotep by his metaphorical shoulders, headbutt him, and shake his stunned figure back and forth like a rag doll while bellowing +_**Look, we're dying by the thousands on earth, we're all utterly unsettled by this newfound tendency of humans to fight back in any competent fashion, some of the Great Old Ones are whispering about throwing their lot in with the winning side despite my constant disciplining of them, that winning side most emphatically NOT being us, and the last thing I require or desire from you is cursed self-indulgent vagueness. GIVE US DEFINITE DETAILS ON WHAT YOU'RE PLANNING, YOU BASTARD.**_+

He quashed that urge with some effort, and cursed earth for getting to him. In a mild tone, he asked +_**What do you intend, my lord?**_+

"Well, I wouldn't wish to spoil things," smiled Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu's limbs twitched), "But I have contacted other Outer Gods, who have expressed a desire to aid our purge. And my own banishment from earth will end on the morrow. The Great Old Ones have fought well. Your work shall be eased."

As relief washed over Cthulhu, his mind still worked. The other Outer God couldn't be mindless Azathoth, who merely writhed and gibbered at the heart of the universe. That left …

+_**Both you and Yog-Sothoth will intervene on earth, my lord?**_+

"Oh yes. I care not what humanity can manifest against our servants, they have _nothing_ which can threaten an Outer God. At least not yet. I have a mission of unparalleled importance for you, Cthulhu."

+_**Whatever you will, my lord.**_+

"Good. On the western coast of the North American continent, you have presumably sensed something of great power."

+_**Yes, my lord. I intended to dispatch Zoth-Ommog to uncover it.**_+

"That object you sense is the _Necronomicon_. I want you to go after it yourself, taking all your servants and cultists and more Great Old Ones than you feel will be sufficient. Retrieve the _Necronomicon_, and kill every human guarding it. They are attempting to read it. If they succeed … Ah, but they will not succeed. I have great faith in you, my servant."

+_**I shall not fail, my lord,**_+ said Cthulhu, fading into nothing.

Nyarlathotep drifted alone in the void once more, his enthusiasm unabated.

He could already feel the hilt of the razor in his hand again. He would teach the remnants of humanity the cost of resistance. He would carve it into their very souls.

* * *

The 13th of October started cold and windy, and showed no signs of stopping.

Wybie, wrapped in his coat and wearing a long grey scarf that flapped behind him in the wind, drove towards the Pink Palace under a slate-grey sky. He nodded at the sentries at the perimeter emplacements, who waved him through and up the driveway. Grinding to a halt in front of the door to the hallway, he dismounted, took his rifle and bag from the straps on the motorbike, and walked inside and signed himself in on the ledger nailed to one of the walls.

"Any change in her?" he said without much hope to Olney, who was on guard outside the study.

"Still nothing, kid," said Olney. "She's still locked to the thing."

Wybie sighed, and walked back out to his post behind the sandbags on the porch. He braced the rifle across them, and leaned back against the wall.

Below, the dozen or so guards on duty patrolled throughout the maze of sandbags and barbed wire that surrounded the house. The guards' APC was parked in one clear area connected to the driveway, with whatever weedy rays of sunlight were present glinting off its battered surface.

An hour passed on Wybie's watch, and the sky grew darker and vanished the sunlight playing off the APC.

Half an hour after that, a drizzle of raindrops descended.

Fifteen minutes later, Wybie was as huddled beneath the guttering as he could get in order to avoid the deluge of rainwater, an action he regretted when the gutters overflowed and deposited a large quantity of water on top of his head.

When he had first started the watch around the Pink Palace, he had dreaded the possibility of the Outer Realms discovering their position. Now he silently willed them to come and break the monotony already. It was bad enough his best friend was mind-travelling through another dimension (or whatever the hell that book was doing to her), he didn't need to be bored out of his skull while it was going on.

At midday, Miss Alhazred started her shift at the Pink Palace. She walked the two mile route from Ashland every day, regardless of the weather, and shook off the sopping umbrella before she walked into the Pink Palace.

"Any...?" she began.

"No." said Wybie.

"Damn it," she snapped, shrugging off her heavy overcoat, "That's been nearly two weeks."

She stamped past into the house, leaving Wybie on the porch.

Two monotonous hours later, the rain died down, though the sky remained as resolutely grey as ever. Miss Alhazred wandered outside and stood next to Wybie, leaning on her own rifle. Wybie turned around, and was perturbed to see a grin on her face.

"Looks like snow," she said, happily.

"Uh...Miss Alhazred, are you alright?" began Wybie. Then he registered what she had just said. "Wait, what? In October? Isn't that a bit early?"

"Is it? I move around a lot, I'm not up to date on Oregon's weather patterns. Could be Outer Realms influence on the climate, or just a freak winter. And yes, Wybie, I'm alright. I've just received great news."

"Is it Coraline?" said Wybie, hope rising as he stood as bolt upright as his back would let him. "Has she…?"

"No," she said placating, "I'm afraid not." Wybie slumped. "But we can expect additional help to arrive soon enough."

"What do you mean? Are other order members arriving?"

Miss Alhazred scrutinised the horizon. She stood still and silent for a moment, frowning, and then her features broke with relief.

"There's a pair of military-issue binoculars on the kitchen table in the palace," she said. "Go in and get them. I'll cover you."

Wybie dived into the Pink Palace, and re-emerged a minute later, clenching a pair of heavy black binoculars.

"You see that road in the distance? Focus in on it."

Wybie raised the binoculars to his eyes, and focused in on the road. He could see vehicles travelling along it, and he zoomed in further to get a closer look. Then his jaw dropped.

The vehicles were an assortment of war machines used by the US armed forces. APCs trundled alongside AFVs, and one of the vehicles in the centre, Wybie swore, bore a marked resemblance to a tank.

And above the road, above the vehicles, above the tree-tops, sleek black helicopters droned. Even from this distance, Wybie could see soldiers sitting on the sides.

"Who exactly are they?" he managed weakly, after a while.

Miss Alhazred's smile widened.

* * *

From the collection of war machines and milling soldiers and people in black suits, two men strode towards the Pink Palace, moving with the ease and confidence of authority.

One of them was tall, powerfully built, and wore the combat gear of the 75th Ranger Regiment. He carried a carbine with an underslung grenade launcher, and regarded the world with cool brown eyes staring out of a weathered brown face, with his shoulders bearing a sergeant's stripes.

The other was H. P. Lovecraft. He carried no obvious weapon, and he seemed shrunken and more haggard than before, his eyes bloodshot and his hair wild.

They were met at the steps leading up the Pink Palace's porch by Miss Alhazred and Wybie.

"Good to see you had a change of heart, you old goat," said Miss Alhazred, her face shot through with relief.

Lovecraft laughed, a short, empty laugh.

"I think we should all be glad of that," he said. "I'll talk more with you later, Abra. Er, may I introduce Sergeant Foley, acting commander of the 1st Battalion of the Army Rangers. He's brought three hundred soldiers with him, as well as ten fighting vehicles and five helicopters. I brought twenty two order members. That should be an adequate fighting force."

"A sergeant taking the acting command?" said Wybie with some surprise. "How did that happen, sir?"

"A slaughter of all the commissioned officers at headquarters, is what happened," said the sergeant in a smooth, deep voice that put Wybie uncannily in mind of the cat that used to hang around here, though he couldn't imagine why. "Mr Lovecraft, I intend to post most of my men in the barracks in Ashland. I'll leave a dozen squads to help shore up the defences here, with your permission."

"Yes, thank you, sergeant. You do what you feel is best."

Foley nodded, threw off a salute, and moved back towards the mass of rangers, calling for someone called Ramirez to come and assist him. Lovecraft turned back to Miss Alhazred.

"I cannot apologise enough, my dear, for not bringing assistance earlier. I hope you have had no trouble thus far?"

"We've not been bothered by the Outer Realms yet," said Miss Alhazred. "Look, Howard, why did you change your mind? Why are you here now?"

"I had a little think to myself after your phone call," confessed Lovecraft. "Once you'd hung up, I was furious. But, once I'd calmed down, and I'd considered our conversation … well."

He let the words hang in the damp air, the silence punctured with the growling of the moving vehicles, the laughter and barked orders and occasional blasphemy from the soldiers, the questions from the now-outnumbered guards, the chatter of order members, and the occasional rumble from above the clouds.

"There are no words to express my sorrow for my arrogance," said Lovecraft, after the noisy silence had gragged on long enough. "All I can hope to do is make amends now. The _Necronomicon_ is our only hope now. Er, has Coraline started reading it?"

"She has," said Wybie. "But she's not in much condition for talking."

"Take me to her," said Lovecraft.

As they marched up the steps and into the Pink Palace, leaving the growing din of preparation behind them, Lovecraft whispered to Miss Alhazred, "By the way, Abra...?"

"Yes?"

"When … when I spoke, in that phone call, of sleeping easily after my decisions to bomb the cities..."

"Yes?"

He turned to her, his eyes desperate and mad, criss-crossed with scarlet veins. "That was a lie. In the two weeks since I phoned, I've only gotten one real night of sleep. The...the dreams...the screaming and begging...the fire...well, it was enough to put me off sleeping for a while. A good long while"

Abra stared back into Lovecraft's eyes, into the pained brown circles begging for some, for any, forgiveness. She reached out and gently patted him on the shoulder.

"Please get some tonight," she said softly. "We need you awake and alert. We need you at your best."

They reached the door to the study, and when Wybie reached down to the handle and swung it open, the hinges squeaking in protest...

"Good heavens," said Lovecraft.

Coraline sat with her legs crossed, her hands tight around the book, her entire form blazing with unearthly light. Her eyes were filled with emerald pools of fire, her hair was wild and flying around her head, fading to brown at the roots. She was floating in the air, a thin column of green fire lancing from the chair to her body and coruscating around her. A rope tied to a desk leg and fastened around her waist prevented her from rising more than a few feet above the chair.

"Howard, is this normal for this to happen while reading the Necronomicon?" demanded Abra.

"I have not a clue," declared Howard, utterly baffled. "That's something I don't recall your grandparents or any of the sources I looked up mentioning. Um..."

He reached out and gently tapped the sole of one of Coraline's swampers with the tip of one finger, and recoiled as a spark of fire leapt from it. Coraline continued bobbing in the air, her hands turning the pages, utterly lost to the world.

"Holy hells," he said. "She's thick with Outer Realms energy. I daren't go near her."

"What can we do?" said Wybie. "Is there anything we can do for her?"

"Pray, if you're of a religious bent," said Lovecraft. "Otherwise, just sit tight, hope, and keep your gun loaded."

He sighed, and turned to face Miss Alhazred and Wybie, his eyes sorrowful.

"You do appreciate," he began, "That it isn't a matter of _if_ the Outer Realms discover us. It's a matter of _when_. And they'll send very nearly everything they have in an effort to gain the Necronomicon. I used what power I could to mask its presence in Providence. Here, we have no such luxury."

Wybie's face set, showing nothing but grim determination.

"Whatever they send, Mr Lovecraft, it'll have to be _really_ powerful."

Before him, visible through the office's windows, snowflakes began to drift downwards.

* * *

Curry County, the south-westernmost county of Oregon, slept.

The dark cloudy sky (darker than usual, for reasons none but astronomers could put their finger on) hung over the dark waters of the Pacific.

The waters rocked, disturbed only by the constant swishing of the tide.

And then ripples began to appear, more and more spreading across the sea's black surface. The tips of obsidian spearheads rose from the waters, then the spearshafts, and then the countless Deep Ones bearing them.

They surged out of the water like a mockery of the tide, and set food on the land. Behind them, the lights of gunboats and battleships commandeered by distant cults shone through a bank of mist.

And behind them, a form the size of a mountain wrapped in shadow loomed from the ocean. It looked upon the hordes of its servants, on the guns of the ships opening fire on the coastal communities, on the fires that bloomed one by one like flowers in the darkness.

It raised its tentacled head high, opened its mouth, and unleashed one terrible alien ululation that shrieked through the night and heralded unspeakable horrors, that droned into the hearts of all the Great Old Ones on earth.

+_**March, my servants,**_+ ordered Cthulhu. +_**Eastwards to Ashland. Kill all in your path.**_+


	18. Marching Through Ashland

At half past eight in the morning of October the 14th, Wybie arrived at the Pink Palace, his motorbike sending a spray of snow behind it as it sped up the driveway. The mountains to the north and south loomed over the landscape, which was white after last night.

The overnight snowfall wasn't expected to settle, not after the ground had been soaked by near-constant rain. But the snow was accompanied by a rapid drop in temperature that all but froze the damp earth, and the snow accumulated in heaps. The salt put down by the rangers on the driveway was overwhelmed every half-hour, and had to keep on being replaced.

Wybie sped past the new defences the rangers had erected, razor wire fences and machine gun nests bristling around the perimeter like the spines of a hedgehog. Three small AA guns had also been erected by the rangers, pointing south, north-west, and north-east. As he moved closer to the front door, he saw Lovecraft standing there, wrapped in a long black coat and scarf and talking quickly into a mobile phone.

"Wybourne," said Lovecraft briskly as Wybie approached, snapping the phone shut and tucking it into his jacket pocket. "Something's going on in Ashland that Sergeant Foley wishes to see me about. I need you to act as commander along with Pargat while I and the rest of the order are in Ashland. Can you do that?"

"Sure," said Wybie, secretly glowing with pleasure at becoming acting-commander. "What's going on in Ashland?"

"We appear to have some new allies whom possess information on an oncoming Outer Realms horde," said Lovecraft. "So its both good news and bad news, in a sense. I shan't be long."

"You can count on me."

"Incidentally, I would like to borrow your motorcycle."

* * *

At twenty to nine, Howard had located Sergeant Foley, and dismounted the too-small motorcycle in front of Ashland Town Hall and strode up the white stone steps into the building. Outside the building, rangers were evacuating whatever people had stayed in Ashland, pointing and directing them along the northern roads, away from the occupied south-west and embattled mid-west.

Inside the hall, he found Foley talking with a woman in military uniform, who turned and revealed the uniform of an officer of the People's Liberation Army. Next to them was a small table with a coffee pot and steaming mugs.

"Commander Lovecraft," said the Chinese officer in clipped, precise English, standing at attention, her face alert and composed despite showing clear signs of exhaustion, "It is an honour to meet you, sir. I am Major Song, of the 269th Mechanised Infantry Brigade."

"At ease, Major," said Lovecraft. "A brigade? Where's your senior colonel?"

"Dead," said Song simply. "Along with nearly the entire brigade. Myself and forty-two soldiers are all that remains."

"Sergeant Foley here told me that you have information relating to an Outer Realms force. Call me someone who jumps to conclusions, but I don't suppose your brigade's decimation is involved with that force?"

"Yes, sir."

"Take a seat, then, and tell me."

Song took a breath and a sip of coffee before she begun.

"When the General Secretary received your world-wide order for whatever soldiers were available to congregate in Ashland, he dispatched the 269th immediately. We had been held in reserve, and your message was quite emphatic about the urgency of the situation. We immediately set out from Ningbo on a fleet of troop ships and destroyers, intending to make good time."

"But when the fleet was pushing through the Pacific, we came upon a mass of those … what do you call them? Deep Ones? Deep Ones with nightgaunts overhead, nearly ten thousand of the creatures. The ships' guns and aircraft managed to kill or scatter all of them before they could draw close, but even as we celebrated a victory, the ranking officers realised that the creatures were heading eastwards to the United States. Several of the aircraft were dispatched to perform reconnaissance, and what they found..."

"A huge host of Deep Ones and nightgaunts and other Outer Realms creatures, backed up with cultists armed with human weaponry, led by a Great Old One, was on the move towards Oregon. There was at least two million of them in just one section of ocean surveyed, and we estimated a total of ten million spread across the entire seaboard. And they noticed us."

"We were overwhelmed in matter of minutes. Cult warships attacked us from a distance as Deep Ones swarmed over the sides, while nightgaunt swarms tore apart our few aircraft. The ship carrying my company managed to break free, though we took heavy casualties in the process. The rest of the fleet burned behind us."

"When we landed … hah, not so much a landing as a crash … there were maybe only a hundred survivors, counting the crew. I was the last officer, and I instructed the crew to stay put and alert while we pressed on towards Ashland. We had to make good time across the state, for there were already Outer Realms creatures infesting the coastal territories. We were low on supplies, low on food and ammunition, many of us were wounded, and we were all exhausted. But we had to press on. You needed us."

"The 269th reports for duty, sir," she finished. "I am sorry we couldn't arrive sooner."

"When was the last time you or your men slept, Major?" asked Foley, filling the brooding silence that filled the hall.

"That was … I think two days ago? Roughly fifty hours," said Song, who swayed as she spoke.

"Then what I want the 269th to do is to report to our base of operations at the Pink Palace, two miles outside of Ashland. Private Ramirez outside will be able to direct you there. Ramirez!" called Foley.

"When you're there, report to my acting-commanders, either Lieutenant Pargat or Wybourne Lovat," said Lovecraft. "Er, that last one will be the boy wearing a skull mask and heavy coat. He's not hard to spot. They'll be able to direct you to points in the defences where you'll be able to assist, as well as accommodation and food for your soldiers. Actually, sleep first, defend later. That's an order."

"Sir," said Song, throwing off a salute and marching briskly outside to the waiting Ramirez.

A pregnant silence followed her departure.

"Ten million, did she say?" said Lovecraft, after a while.

"Yes, sir," said Foley.

"Any feedback from your teams in the south and east?"

"Nothing solid. But there's likely to be strikes from there as well."

"Oh, good," said Lovecraft after another while. "For a moment there, I was almost worried this might be easy."

* * *

At twelve o'clock in the Pink Palace, Lieutenant Pargat had just received a most unwelcome message, which he was to forward to Lovecraft and Foley in Ashland.

Whatever hope had been raised in his heart by the arrival of the Chinese had been fed into a mincer and consumed by this particular communiqué.

"Mr Lovecraft," he said into a receiver, "I've just received news from the rangers posted to the south and east. Both teams report large enemy forces moving towards our position. Both forces, designated Calarm and Oregarm, arriving from California and eastern Oregon respectively, are in excess of five million combatants. Outer Realms creatures comprise the majority of both forces, and each has human cultists among their numbers, armed with modern weaponry. There are also suspected to be Great Old Ones amongst the forces."

"Oddly enough," said Pargat, after a moment, "I used that exact phrase when I heard this as well, sir."

In the study next to which Pargat was standing, Coraline's floating form twitched and stirred.

* * *

At seventeen past two, Cthulhu sighted Ashland, after a full night's travelling.

+_**Destroy it.**_+ he ordered, and so it was done.

The Outer Realms surged forward in a mindless mass, the more bloodthirsty cultists leading with the Deep Ones hard on their tails, with nightgaunts driving down onto the town from the sky.

In the howling blizzard they fought, bulletfire and screams and thunder rolling around the rapidly-reddening city streets. Ranger fought cultist and order member fought creature at the heart of the storm descending upon Oregon, and litanies of devotion to alien gods soared into the white skies.

The tank commanded by the rangers held a whole street by itself for a time, its machine gun ripping apart knots of cultists, its cannon striking at and exploding the creatures of the Outer Realms with every hit. With rangers next to it, covering it against any anti-tank weapons the cultists could bring to bear, the tank was unstoppable. At least, until the nightgaunts came.

They came howling out of the sky, their wings flapping, their blank faces alight with a demonic glee, as they plunged into the rangers, tearing and ripping with their claws and mutilating and torturing wherever they got a chance. And as the rangers died, the door of the tank was ripped off, and the operators crucified on their own engine.

Street after street descended into fire and rubble as, little by little, the defenders were pushed back by the sheer weight of numbers. Those civilians who hadn't fled or joined the Ashland National Guard joined the battle, fighting to defend their homes and families. They tried, they failed, they died if they were lucky.

And as the town hall fell, Lovecraft, who had acquired a ballistic vest and several new scars in the fighting, received further messages to the effect that Calarm and Oregarm were making a beeline for the Pink Palace, were within spitting distance, and what the hell was going on in Ashland?

"We're falling back _now_," he roared in the midst of the battle, lead shrieking and streaking and punching through walls and blockades and bodies alike. "_Fall back! Fall back! To the Pink Palace!_"

"To the Pink Palace!" roared Sergeant Foley, standing atop a pile of flaming rubble, covering the retreat of a squad of rangers with a burst of fire from his rifle into a cluster of Deep Ones. "We'll make our stand there! Move or die here!"

And as the cry of "To the Pink Palace!" spread amongst the surviving rangers, who withdrew through the ruins, running into the country away from the ruins of Ashland, Cthulhu looked on, and was satisfied.

+_**Do not engage them at the Pink Palace yet,**_+ he relayed to his forces and to the Great Old Ones commanding Calarm and Oregarm, +_**They shall not yield as easily next time. We must prepare a proper offence.**_+

His troops howled with triumph and glee, and set about whatever preparations they could. They salvaged ammunition and weapons from the dead, bandaged their wounds, and took bodies from the battlefield, living or dead, to nail to pieces of wood and to serve as grisly totems of their victory here.

And they looked towards the Pink Palace, their eyes ablaze with reflected fires.

* * *

At five o'clock, the chaplain and medics for the rangers were still overwhelmed with work.

"A hundred and twenty rangers dead … more on the way … here next … my brother, please, someone must have seen him … armed with rocket launchers … Calarm an hour away, why are they waiting? … outdid themselves … let them come."

The snippets of conversation floated around Wybie's head as he walked, ringing hollow in his ears. He already had a fair grasp of the situation.

So this was it, he thought as he looked at the darkening sky, the western section of which was still black with smoke from Ashland (he wondered, in a detached, cynical part of his mind, whether the founders had appreciated how apt the name would end up becoming). This was how and where it would end.

They would fight here, with all of their fury and skill, militia and ranger and rifleman and order member alike, to defend the Pink Palace, to defend Coraline and buy her enough time to finish her reading. If she succeeds, then hopefully we win. If she doesn't … well, we'll go down swinging. And we'll have given them scars to remember.

He wandered around the porch, bumping into three order members, Abra and Olney and another relatively young one grasping an old tome and wearing a plaid flannel shirt.

"...best plan we'll get," said Abra. "I'll stay in the front lines with the rangers. Olney, you take whichever of the soldiers here is the best in hand-to-hand combat, and you engage the first Great Old One which comes close. Jack, you use your magic to bolster the Chinese soldiers and to deflect fire at the palace itself. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"Agreed." Between them, there were no other words needed. They paused for an embarrassed second, and then had a three-way hug.

"Meet you both in Valhalla," said Olney with a grin, striding off. "I'll tell the Great Old Ones already there to expect further company." They all moved off in different direction, Abra passing Wybie as she went. She paused and nodded, and Wybie returned the nod. There was no more to say, or that needed to be said.

He took up his position at a corner of the porch, behind the sandbags that had been built around it. Below him, the first ring of defences containing the Chinese and guards lay, stretching for twenty metres and into the garden. Beyond them, the rangers held the second ring. Most of the defence was concentrated on the west, south, and east sides.

At six o'clock, the end began, as the snow drove downwards and the shape of the oncoming enemy became apparent even through the blinding snow. They were massed in their millions, lurching and marching and slithering through the snow. They were legion. They were unstoppable.

The void stopped half a mile distant, and gazed into humanity. Humanity gazed back, its hand on the trigger of its gun.

The void blinked first.

"Zann," said Lovecraft from his position on the east flank, "I don't suppose you could give us a little tune on your violin, could you? I wouldn't mind hearing a bit of music before this begins."

The old, blind violinist nodded, sheathed his absurdly large claymore across his back, and drew out his treasured violin. He grasped it tenderly in one hand,his other holding the bow.

And he subtly shifted his grip, turning the violin into a fiddle. The differences between the instruments are negligible, but important. A violin is used to soothe and carry higher emotions, preferably as part of an orchestra. A fiddle can be used by itself, and aggravates emotions instead of soothing them.

The dirge of Erich Zann howled across and over the blizzard, a wild tune of mourning and loss and grief, a tune played at funerals.

A tune directed outwards at the waiting Outer Realms.

And as its last notes were carried away by the wind, the three armies howled their war cries and charged.

"Fire as they come within range!" shouted Lovecraft, as war drums and charging feet thundered. "Give them no mercy! Give them no quarter! Give them nothing but your fury! _For Earth_!"

"For Earth!" roared the defenders of the Pink Palace as one, as the snow-filled dark sky echoed their fire with the crash of thunder.

* * *

And two weeks and three hours ago to this very second, Coraline began reading the _Necronomicon_.

The words, even as she plunged on through the book, seemed almost to rise and float around her, as her mind started to scream with the force of information, as all the secrets suddenly pouring in as she helplessly turned each page threatened to overwhelm her.

And as the barrage of information reached a crescendo, she …

… _travelled_, is perhaps the only word.

No words or phrases or metaphors with in any human language can accurately describe Coraline's sensation of travelling. The only way to get any sort of impression of the affair is to do the following.

Step one; take a large, fresh example of a Psilocybin mushroom, and grind it up into a fine powder.

Step two; mix this powder with a half-pint of rhinoceros tranquilliser and a few drops of venom from the vesicle of the extremely rare and exceedingly toxic Southern Colorado ruby-legged scorpion.

Step three; stir thoroughly, now.

Step four; knock it back in one swig. Imagine a circle of friends chanting "Chug! Chug! Chug!" if it helps.

The images you see, just before you die, will be roughly similar to the images seen during travelling between mindscapes.

Coraline came to in darkness, surrounded by cold and dampness.

Pushing herself up, spitting out snow, she found herself in the midst of a blizzard. Half-formed through the shifting winds, she saw the dark tower.


	19. Dream Quest, Pt 1

It wasn't the same tower she had seen in her dreams, Coraline knew that much. For one thing, it was bigger.

It was a couple of miles away at least and rose through the gusts of wind and snow, rising out of the top of a gently sloping-upwards plateau of ice and rock. It was easily half a mile wide at the base and coated in shifting black-green marble, and it seemed to rise forever into the endless dark sky. Coraline assumed it must have a top, but she could only conceive of it in the same way she could conceive of the edge of the universe.

And in spite what she had seen and done since she had last seen it, it still hurt to look at it. Its voice tore across Coraline's ear drums, reverberating and shaking and almost making Coraline cry out in pain as it rasped like a band-saw.

**Come forward**, roared the _Necronomicon_ incarnate as its voice matched the howling winds in volume, **Come forward, child of earth, and surrender your soul. End your crusade before my doors.**

Shivering with cold and more than a little fear, Coraline willed her frozen hands to check off her tools which had resonated from reality and manifested here.

Hat, check.

Clothes not intended to be worn in the heart of winter, check.

Yellow raincoat and swampers, check.

Flashlight, check. The odds of encountering vampire Scotties in there was minimal, she supposed, but it may yet prove useful in that darkest of places.

Sword, check. Okay, that would definitely be useful. Throat, eyes, groin. If whatever was in there had at least one of these, she was in with a chance.

An iron resolve to defeat whatever the tower threw at her?

_...the kitchen rose, red and sorrow-streaked, in her memory. Her mom and dad, once laughing and busy and living, and now..._

Check. She forced back the tears that rose at the memory, and her face set in an expression that would have scared the devil. There could be no room for sorrow now, not when the fate of everything hung in the balance. There would be no hesitation, no holding back, no mercy for the Outer Gods that threatened to snuff out life like a candle in the darkness.

She started forward, huddling into her coat against the harsh winds and setting her gaze firmly on the distant dot-sized door in the tower's base. The tower couldn't be more than two miles distant, by her estimation. If she made good time, hopefully not all of her digits would freeze off.

For what seemed like hours, she stumbled and strode over the frozen stones that made up the ground, her arms clenched tight around her and her teeth chattering. _Oh, my twitchy witchy girl_… she thought, the song rising unbidden to the front of her mind, warding against the rising whispers. _I think you are so nice. I give you bowls of porridge and I give you bowls of ice..._

As she drew nearer the base, she suddenly noticed something near the door in the side, something like a pile of furs.

And as she drew yet nearer, the furs moved and sat upright, the person inside having noticed Coraline. Fifty metres distant from the tower, the figure wrapped in the furs stood up and started walking out to meet Coraline.

"Stay back," called Coraline, her voice harsh and trembling in the bitterly cold air, with her hand firmly around the drawn sword's hilt. "I've got a weapon, and I'm not afraid to use it if I have to."

"Peace, peace," cried the figure, the fur-muffled voice revealing it as a man, as it moved more slowly towards her. "I am not your enemy. I can help you in this place." His accent seemed familiar, yet was frustratingly unplaceable.

"Stop there," commanded Coraline, pointing the sword at the man. "I'll come to you."

The man obediently stopped, and stayed still as Coraline picked her way across the ground towards him. He seemed small to her now that she was closer; he was barely a head taller than Coraline and whatever bulk he had seemed to come from the furs. His hands fluttered nervously as he stood still, he seemed compelled to do something with his body at all times.

He didn't seem like a threat, but you couldn't take chances in the Outer Realms. Coraline lowered the sword but kept it drawn.

"Who are you?" she said to the man's face, of which only his dark brown eyes were visible beneath the thick fur hood. "Let me see your face."

"If that will give you some measure of trust in me, then as you wish," said the man, tugging at the draw strings for the hood. "And I believe my name will be familiar to you, if you have come this far." He threw back the hood, and revealed a gaunt brown face with feathery black hair and a weak beard. But something rang familiar in the shape of the nose and mouth …

"My name, young dream-quester, is Abdul..."

"...Alhazred," finished Coraline, unable to stop herself, rapt with horror and fascination. She raised the sword again. "You're Miss Alhazred's great-to-the-something grandfather! You're the one who wrote the _Necronomicon_! How can you be here? How have you lived so long?"

"Er, in order," began the Mad Arab, eyeing the sword's point with bemusement. "If you mean Abra, daughter of my unfortunate descendant Hasan and his wife, Faiza, then you are correct. I am the author of the Necronomicon, but you knew that before you asked the question. The third one's answer is too long to sum up in one sentence. As for the fourth one, time is a largely optional concept in the Outer Realms. You really are new at this, aren't you?"

"I didn't know about any of "this" until a couple of months ago," said Coraline in a tone as cold as the plateau around her. "But if you have anything useful you can tell me, then tell me."

"Of course. Please, do not think I am unsympathetic to your cause, for it is one I share. Shall we discuss this in the tower?"

"What exactly's in there?"

"Answers. Allies. Room-temperatures." said Abdul dryly.

"After you." She had no reason to trust him, she knew, or even to believe that he was really Abdul Alhazred. But he seemed to have a comfortingly solidness and humanity about him despite his withered frame, and, admittedly, even a polar bear would think it was pretty cold out here. Besides, she'd still have her sword if he tried any funny business.

"As you wish." And with that, he walked briskly back to the little door and prised it open. He hunched down and crawled through it, and after a moment's thought, Coraline bent down and followed.

The tunnel wasn't dark as in her dreams, but was similar to the entry to the Other World. It was small and circular and long, and the walls seemed to pulse with a faint blue-purple light. But the similarities ended there, the ground and walls were furry and almost alive rather than smooth, and the whispering of the tower was louder here. Peering for a moment at one of the walls, Coraline could make out the vague silhouettes of people through the thin material. Placing her hand on it for a moment, one of the silhouettes lunged forward. Something brushed furiously at her fingers through the wall, and she recoiled and hurried along the tunnel.

Scrambling out the end, she found Abdul waiting there in a bleak stone room. The room was empty except for a door in the wall across from the tunnel, and a wooden table and chairs. On the table was a hunk of bread and a pewter flagon of some dark liquid.

"It is a peculiar tunnel, is it not?" said Abdul, who extended a hand to help Coraline up. "The human victims and soul-bound of the Outer Realms are forced into constant imprisonment amongst the nooks and crannies of the cold void of unreality. Poor desperate creatures. They yearn for a tiny bit of the warmth and reality they once had, a yearning which can never be satisfied. Can I offer you some food and wine?"

"Thanks," said the unsettled Coraline, who suddenly realised how long it had been since she had last eaten and sat herself down at the table. She tore off a chunk of the bread and tore at it ravenously. Abdul sat silently in the other chair.

"Would you like a drink?" he said after she had eaten about half the bread.

She cautiously peered into the flagon. The liquid was the colour of liquorice and the smell, no, the _reek_ of alcohol hammered upwards.

"Is this wine?" she asked.

"My father told me as such. It is a speciality of the village in which I was born."

Coraline took a sip, and instantly regretted it.

"It is entirely possible the old bastard was lying, of course," said Abdul mildly as Coraline spluttered. "There were never any grapes involved, which I found suspicious. Plenty of grains, herbs, and no end of distillation, but no grapes. It's rather strong, isn't it?"

Coraline's response was a marriage between a nod and a choke. The drink seemed to have left a lattice of fire down her throat.

"Regardless of its taste," said Abdul more seriously, folding his arms, "You have eaten my food and drink, and I must now extend to you my hospitality. You franks of the New World are familiar with sacred hospitality, I trust? The host shall not harm the guest, the guest shall not harm the host. I shall offer you my advice, my food, my trust, and my protection, and I swear to this by all the laws that bind me, the traditions that made me, and the god that judges me. I am not your enemy in this place. May I have your trust and your name?"

Coraline paused here. She had read about the code of sacred hospitality practised in the Dark Ages, and she knew that such customs would have been ranked higher than laws by those who practised them. But if this was an illusion of the tower, then it would have no such inhibitions. But to hell with it, she needed to trust someone. And Abdul felt like the real thing.

"I trust you," she said, extending a hand, "And my name is Coraline Jones." Abdul gave the hand a quizzical look, and then something clicked.

"I saw a frankish trader do this, once," he said, grasping the hand. "It shows there is no weapon in the hand, correct? Nothing with which you will attack me. A gesture of trust."

"I think that's the gist of it," said Coraline, releasing her grip. "What's a frank, anyway?"

"Forgive me, it was our term for the people of Europa. The blue-eyed westerners who revered the prophet Isa as a god in his own right." Abdul shrugged. "Each to their own."

"You said you would tell me about the _Necronomicon_," pressed Coraline. "What can you tell me of it?"

"Far too much. You know the basics, I trust. I wrote it, acting under the curse of knowing all about the Outer Realms. I vanished mysteriously after writing it, and it resurfaced throughout history, causing madness and misery wherever it went. There are a few copies of it, but this volume – the one you're reading right now – is the original, the unsullied terror of the Outer Realms on ink and parchment."

He then took a long draw from the flagon to steady himself, while Coraline waited impatiently.

"But when I wrote the book, I created something I had no way of controlling. Tell me, Coraline, what would you call something with the knowledge of an Outer God, the imparted experiences of Outer Gods, and bearing insight into the human condition in addition to all possible knowledge of the Outer Realms?"

He stopped there, his pointed finger wobbling slightly.

"Personally," he said, "I'd call it an Outer God. And a cruel and dangerous one at that."

"Wait, wait, wait," said Coraline after a horrified silence, "You created a new _Outer God_ by _writing about them_?"

"Not quite an Outer God, no," said Abdul quickly, holding up his hands. "More … ah, dangerous than an Outer God."

This did little to aid his line of argument.

"I don't understand," said Coraline, anger and confusion and frustration tearing around her thoughts like excited terriers snapping at each other's tails. "How can you create a new Outer God?"

"When I wrote it, I wrote of all the aspects of the Outer Gods. Their nature, their concepts in the grand scale of things, their place in the universe. And such knowledge is dangerous. For one thing, it has a will of its own. The words and ideas on the page produced something terrible and powerful, something wielding supreme knowledge of the Outer Gods and possessing the power of one as well. It was a horrific mess, and I was its first victim. When I … when I tried to undo it all, when I dived back into the pages of the Necronomicon, it set its will against mine. It won, and claimed me, body and soul. And it was as malevolent and cunning as any being of the Outer Realms. I was not its last victim."

"What do you mean?" said Coraline, having a sinking feeling that she already knew the answer.

"It hungers for more victims," continued Abdul. "And it readily exploits the knowledge it contains. When some young explorer who learned too much hears about its knowledge, and more specifically the possibility that it contains knowledge on how to destroy the Outer Gods, then they will hunt for it. They assure themselves that they can stomach what it might do, and they are inevitably proven wrong. And once the Necronomicon had finished tormenting them, it keeps them forever and always, and thus it takes its due from the world. By virtue of its own existence, it feeds."

The shadows cast by a flickering light on the left wall grew longer as Abdul downed the last of the flagon. Coraline sat in her chair, utterly alone.

And then she straightened up, her eyes casting their own fire.

"You wrote it," she said. "You know what it contains. Does it hold the secrets of destroying the gods?"

"It does. But I cannot use that secret and tell you it. The Necronomicon shall not let me. Its grasp over me is as iron in that respect. It wants you to challenge it for the information. It wants to destroy you itself."

"Then if it wants me to face it, I shall," snapped Coraline. "And I will destroy it in turn. I don't care what it has faced, what it thinks it knows about humans, or what it plans to do. I will take its secrets by force, and I will destroy every last Outer God. Do you understand, Mr Alhazred? I will not let it win this time. It has won for too long."

"Then if pressing on is truly your desire, in spite of all I've told you," said Abdul with a sad, slow smile, "Then there may be hope for humanity yet. It awaits you at the top of the tower. Between you and it, it has left its past victims to erode your will before it crushes you for good. "

"Then let's go and meet them," said Coraline, standing up and walking to the door. "I'll see if they can help me."

"Then go," said Abdul, his smile more confident. "But it is a rather long journey. I will give you my company, if you still wish it."

Coraline nodded, and pulled on the door's handle. Beyond the room, the Necronomicon laughed.

**Bring your storm, child.**


	20. Dream Quest, Pt 2

The corridor beyond the door seemed to stretch on forever on the gentle curving upwards slope, or at least so it seemed to Coraline as she walked up it.

Every inch of the floor and walls was polished smooth stone, cold and unfriendly in the faint light provided by flickering torches mounted along the ceiling. The only sounds were the guttering of the torches, the tapping of Abdul and Coraline's feet, and the omnipresent faint whispering.

In an effort to break the silence, Coraline tried to strike up a conversation.

"I'm curious about something. How is it that you can speak English? I thought the language didn't even exist in Britain in the Dark Ages, let alone in the Middle East."

"I'm not speaking English," said Abdul simply. "As far as I'm aware, I'm speaking Classical Arabic in the dialect of my home village, and you seem to be speaking the same language in the dialect of Hajr, a major city and cosmopolitan centre. The energies bound into the _Necronomicon_ seek to be understood. The writing in it will shift to your language's script, and even make some effort to adapt to your specific dialect, in the effort to draw you in, with the welcome side effect that we inside it can talk to each other."

"Ah," said Coraline, satisfied. Then, "Wait, so what would happen if you couldn't read or spoke a language that had no alphabet? How would you understand it then?"

"Presumably, the _Necronomicon_ would at that moment become a nice, simple picture book," said Abdul with a shiver, "And the less we contemplate of that, the better."

Another silence followed.

"Abra's well."

"Is she?"

"Yeah. She's a member of an order dedicated to fighting the Outer Realms. They've got lots of members, and she's one of the more senior ones. She's fought them all her life."

"Truly? Well, I shall pray her fortune persists. Other members of my family haven't been so lucky in their dealings with the Outer Realms."

"My own son, for example," continued Abdul as a light appeared at the end of the corridor and grew larger with each step, "A good lad. Pious. Energetic. Dedicated. Our family was of noble stock, so he had the potential to rise high in the caliphate. But he got himself involved in my affairs, and we've never exactly been on amicable terms since."

Coraline nodded, then frowned as they neared the door at the end, shafts of light poking out from the gaps in the ceiling and floor.

"What do you mean, "since"...?" But Abdul stopped her when he opened the door, and revealed a great deal of light.

It was a beautiful autumn's day in the next room, and Coraline stared open-eyed as she and Abdul emerged from a door set in the middle of a grassy field. The horizon was lined with red-gold trees, the sun shone over deep banks of clouds, the slight breeze was cool on the skin. In the distance, Coraline could see a collection of houses, houses which from this distance seemed to be made from wood and thatch and had thin trails of smoke coming from their chimneys.

Before them, in a field of grass and wildflowers, was a young man stalking back and forth. He turned at their arrival, and his eyes narrowed in on Abdul as he spat "_You_."

"Coraline," said Abdul, in a dull, leaden tone, "May I introduce my first and only son, Azad ibn Abdul Alhazred."

"Why are you here?" snapped Azad, ignoring Coraline and focusing on Abdul. "What more damage do you intend to inflict on the world, you old heretic?" He had inherited his father's face and eyes, which flashed cold and dangerous. His body was tall and well-built, a long curved sword hung from his belt, and he wore chain-mail set with plates of metal set at the chest and forelimbs.

He could have fairly handsome, Coraline decided, were it not for the expression akin to a cross between a scowl and sneer that never seemed to leave his face.

"No desire for conciliation with your father, you little lick-spittle?" said Abdul, whatever mood he'd had vanishing and being replaced with a glower. "No desire to just sit down and hear my side of the story all the way through, just this once?"

"You forfeited your right to a hearing when you consorted with these demons, father," snarled Azad. "And when your dealings resulted in the torture and imprisonment of those who sought to rectify your error, then you crossed the line for forgiveness as far as I am concerned."

"I never intended for any of this, my son," whispered Abdul, seeming diminished and more shrunken than before, "Please believe me. What came to pass was … regrettable, but I cannot be blamed..."

"Spare me your excuses."

"Fine," said Abdul, looking up, his eyes blazing. "Then I shall also spare myself the burden of heeding you and your opinions. If you are set on this, I have no interest in changing your mind."

Coraline knew that whatever the relationship here was, it was beyond her immediate understanding. This was family, after all, where old love and hatred and grudges and forgiveness could blossom and flourish and wither over decades, and these two had clearly had centuries to bicker with each other.

While the two bickered in the background, she explored a little of the countryside around her. Her first impressions of the beautiful landscape held true. It seemed pastoral, idyllic almost. She spared little thought for how it could exist here; a rural landscape appearing in the middle of a eldritch tower was probably the least strange thing that had happened to her in a while.

To the south-west, there rose white smoke, as if the chimneys of an entire city were cosily spewing smoke. The more she looked at the houses (and saw no inhabitants), the more they seemed antiquated and medieval.

Was the place linked to Azad? Did it hold some special meaning for him, something that was linked to the _Necronomicon_? She would have to find out.

"Excuse me," she began. Azad rounded on her, breaking away from his argument with his father.

"And is this the book's latest victim, father? _Your_ latest victim, rather. What agonies do you imagine the _Necronomicon_ will inflict on this one once it grows bored with playing with it like a cat with a mouse? What do you...?"

"Damn you, whelp, you may insult and curse me as you will, I couldn't care less. _But you shall show proper respect to my guest_," thundered Abdul.

Azad stopped there, rocking slightly, his face colouring. He then composed himself, and bowed from the waist.

"I extend my greetings to you, …?"

"Coraline. Coraline Jones." She didn't bother presenting a hand.

"My welcome to you in this unholy place. I am Azad ibn Abdul Alhazred, a commander in the armies of the caliphs, and a humble servant of Allah. And you are..." His expression became dubious for a moment. "A child. A female. A frank. The _Necronomicon_ clearly doesn't discriminate when it selects its victims. In any case, I don't believe you appreciate the enormity of the task you have undertaken."

"Why? Is there anything you can tell about it?"

"Far too much for my liking," said Azad with a bitter laugh. "Know this, Coraline Jones. I was raised and trained in the greatest academies and military centres of the Ummayad Caliphate. The money I inherited when my father seemed to mysteriously vanish was put by my mother towards furnishing me with the finest tutors and trainers. I was the fiercest blade in the academy, the sharpest tactical mind, the most pious servant of Allah. My will was strong, my skill was unequalled, my spirit was eager and ablaze with fury. And when I challenged the _Necronomicon_, I lost, as did others over the years. Why do you think you will succeed where I failed?"

"Maybe you did something wrong," said Coraline, in no mood to be lectured by a centuries-dead man. "How did you find out about the Outer Realms?"

Azad took a moment to gather his thoughts, and then began. Abdul stood to the side, his face expressionless.

"I had not known what heresies my father had committed before I was in my mid-twenties, as he had vanished a few days before I was born. I decided to start learning what I could about my father and his life's work out of sheer curiosity, for my mother had never spoken of him. What I learned shocked me to the core."

"My own father, that bastard before us," At this, Abdul repressed a snort, "I uncovered the foul legacy of his life piece by piece. The few souls I discovered and interrogated spoke of his having consorted with djinn and demons. All of them spoke of the same heresies, so much so and so consistently that the seeds of doubt against my father took hold in my heart. And when I sifted through the sands over the spot where he had vanished, I found my confirmation in the _Necronomicon_."

"I had learned enough to know that this was the same book my father had written, that held secrets on the dark and deadly demons that threatened to destroy us all. I swore to undo my father's dark work. I swore to destroy the gods."

"So I began reading the _Necronomicon_, and found myself here. I met my father outside the dark tower that embodied the tome's evil, but I knew that he was in thrall to the demons beyond and I ignored his entreaties. I challenged the spirit of the _Necronomicon_ in its lair, and I..."

His voice broke off here, and he tried for the next few minutes to summon the rest of his tale. Coraline fidgeted uncomfortably, and Abdul, shaking his head, put one hand on his son's shoulder. It wasn't brushed off until Azad composed himself with some effort.

"It defeated me utterly with a minimum of effort and then it tortured me for its own amusement," he said. "It plucked at the nerves in my lifeless body to see what they would do. It dredged up demons from my memories to torment my mind and break my spirit. It broke me again and again until it got bored with the sport and it threw me into this final horror."

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask, what _is_ this place?" said Coraline, looking around at the lush fields. "Is this place from your history?"

"It is," said Azad grimly. "Behold the fields between the great Frankish cities of Poitiers and Tours. In the year 732 years after the birth of Isa, Emir Rahman led a great army of the caliphate to these realms, intending to claim them in the name of the prophet. But the Frankish general Martel offered us battle, and the slaughter done to our army was terrible. I commanded a wing of the heavy cavalry, and all my men died in the mud and blood and chaos of the battle."

"These fields are the fields of Tours, and every day I am forced to see that battle again. Every night, I see the arrows fly and my men choke on their own blood. I see Rahman die in a stabbing melee of spears, I see myself hold my dying bannerman in my arms. If you look to your right and left," and here he held out his arms to the east and west, "You'll see banners flying and lance tips gleaming in the sun. You'll see men who will die a few hours hence."

"That is what the Necronomicon ultimately does to you. It traps in your own hell, and makes you live through it forever. Please, leave while you can, for I do not want this fate to befall you. It has already stricken others stronger than you."

"Who are the others?" asked Coraline.

"They are, as far as I am aware, a woman of the tribes that came across the Transoxianan plains, a knight of the Teutons, and two more of the line of Alhazred. Do not add yourself to their ranks, girl."

"I have to go on," said Coraline, determination ringing in every syllable. "If I don't, everyone on earth will die. The Outer Realms have invaded our world, and I need to know how to destroy them. Don't you understand? I'm the last chance for earth. I need to defeat the Necronomicon, and I'll need your help."

A moment's fluttery indecision passed for Azad as he looked at Coraline, and then glared at Abdul, who had his back turned and was watching the birds in a meadow, and back to Coraline.

"Look, if you won't help..." began Coraline.

"You are resolved to fight them, even with what I have just told you?"

"More than ever, if that's the sort of thing the book does to people."

"To think I saw the day when a child of the west showed more courage than I," whispered the diminished Azad after another minute. "I offer you my sword and my help. I shall redeem my past defeat"

"Then I'll gladly take your help," said Coraline eagerly. "If we can convince all the others here that we can win, then surely we can beat the Necronomicon."

"Ah, yes, that reminds me," said Azad. "Has my father offered his aid?"

"He has, and I trust him."

"Then I'm definitely going with you," said Azad. "Keep your eye on him. Were I you, I would be ever alert for any treachery on his part."

"I can hear everything you're saying, I'm not deaf yet," called Abdul. "Now, I believe I've found our door..." And his fist closed on thin air, and seemed to pull open a previously non-existent door. "Shall we get a move on? We still have a long journey ahead of us."

"Let's move," said Coraline as she walked to the front. The two Alhazreds followed in her wake as she stepped into the opening.

Inside, she soared with confidence. Admittedly, what she had heard of the Necronomicon here hadn't been good, but at least she now knew what it would do. And she would find the other prisoners and take it on in its own lair.

And she dared it to do its worst.


	21. Dream Quest, Pt 3

The corridor beyond this door was steeper, and more sharply curved, and the right side opened onto a vast, yawning circular chasm that seemed to rise and fall forever at the centre of the tower (or at this part of the tower at least, Coraline had learned that things like geometry and physics didn't mean diddly in the Outer Realms).

She gripped the thin iron handrail as she walked steadily upwards, Azad and Abdul studiously ignoring each other in her wake. The stone underfoot was wet and rough, giving her swampers a good purchase as she hauled herself onwards. Each footstep echoed in the vast emptiness, which was only lit by Coraline's flashlight and the torches borne by Azad and Abdul.

"Who did you say the next person was, Azad?" she asked after five minutes of clambering over rough stone.

"A woman of the tribes that came from Asia, long after I was gone from the world," he answered.

"The Mongols," clarified Abdul, "I've only been able to glean small amounts of information from the world, but they left an impression. They swept like a tide across Eurasia like a punishment from Allah, into the Chin realms and into the Russias, into Hungary and Persia. And into the caliphate."

"The woman must have acquired the _Necronomicon_ there," followed up Azad. "I spoke little with her when she came through, but I imagine she must have looted it. Her kind conquered and plundered blindly, she might not have even known how important it was."

"You give her too little credit," said Abdul firmly. "I spoke with her, and she knew exactly what she was doing. The kind of Genghis lacked for subtlety, but not for courage."

As the two fell back to arguing, Coraline decided to speak to the woman alone, and make her own impressions. They eventually neared the exit, a hewn stone door set into a protrusion from the winding stair. She grasped the handle and pulled it open.

It wasn't sunlight and serenity that greeted her this time, but a vast and chilling emptiness. Endless green and yellow grass extended in all directions to all horizons, stopped only by impossibly small and distant mountains. Wind howled across cold blue skies and sent clouds adrift. Thirty feet before her, a round yurt was the only distinctive feature in this barren lands.

As they edged their way to the small felt structure, a woman poked her head out from it and, upon sighting them, walked out the door frame and towards them.

She was of average height and size and wore fur and felt robes, with black hair tied into a long queue set with small jewels behind her head. She had dark golden skin and dark eyes that scrutinised Coraline as she drew closer.

"My greetings to you," she said (why the _Necronomicon_ chose Iowan as a transliterated accent was a mystery that Coraline would have to solve in her own time.) "You are a fellow seeker for the truths of the Necronomicon, yes?"

"Yes. I'm Coraline Jones."

"I am Bolormaa, of the tribe of Khatagin and of the people of the Khanate. And I wish you better luck in your quest than I had. Or the men behind you, for that matter," she said, waving at Azad and Abdul, both of whom were standing at a distance from Coraline and Bolormaa. "I met them. I thought the warrior had given up hope?"

"He's got it again."

"Truly? You convinced him?" Bolormaa looked Coraline up and down. "You are young. Young indeed to do something as dangerous as this. How did you happen upon the book?"

"I..." Coraline hesitated. "It's a very long story, but lets just say I was introduced to the book by a friend. How did you find it?"

"Another long story. But one that I am in the mood to tell." Her eyes lit up. "When my people swept through the Arabic lands, when Genghis was still alive and leading us to glory, I was married to a cavalry archer captain in a tumen of the army. We moved together as part of the horde down through Persia and Arabia, and I raised our children as he fought the empire's enemies. He was a good husband as husbands go. He respected me, he loved our children, he fought well in his battles."

"And on one day, when he returned from the sacking of a city of the Arabs, he returned bearing gifts from his share of the plunder. A fine sword for himself, beads and gold toys for our son and daughter, and a jewelled necklace for me. And the book. He could not read, but he did know that words and the books that contained them were revered and highly valued by others. And so, knowing that I could read a Turkic language and without taking a look at it himself, he gave it to me, thinking that I might gain some pleasure from it."

"The language on the cover, which was unfamiliar to me, shifted to become written Mongolian, and I knew then that this was no normal tome. I began reading a portion that night, and my misgivings were confirmed and greatly increased by that little amount. The things it spoke of were too terrifying to be considered, but carried an undeniable truth to them that struck a dread into my heart. If such monsters, such unnatural abominations, could exist under the sun's light, what safety was there for my nation? For my tribe? For my family? And I swore that night to destroy the gods."

"I ventured into its pages, and went through what you are doing at this moment. I met these two Arabs as I went in, ignored their warnings, so focused was my fury, and confronted the heart of the_ Necronomicon_. It took less than four minutes to break me, and once it had finished inflicting pain after pain on me, it left me here in the heart of the steppes."

"What do the steppes mean to you?"

"They mean desolation," spat Bolormaa. "They mean the land which I despised as I grew up, and the land for which I married a soldier to get away from. I wanted to see the other lands and peoples the world held, for I had no love for my home, which in turn had no love for me. My old tribe had..." Her face set here. "Let us talk no more of this. But the result is now that I have nothing left to me but the empty steppes. Unless ..." And here her eyes brightened, "Unless you desire my aid and company?"

"I do," said Coraline. "And listen. All these places you wanted to see, all these different lands and cities and wonders … they're all under threat. The Outer Gods … they're waging war on life itself. They're marching across the world and killing anyone in their path. If I don't succeed, then that's it for humanity. We're gone. So any help you can give, I'll gladly take."

"Then know this, Coraline," said Bolormaa, her eyes blazing as she drew herself up to her full height, "Whatever weapons you bear with you shall be of no importance at the end. Your sword will be useless. Your fists will be useless. Whatever weaponry you bring will be useless. Your will alone will save you and the world, for you will have to match it against the Necronomicon and it will be a terrible battle. Hone your mind as we walk, and compose yourself for what will come, for that alone will be your ally. And now ..." She turned and pointed at the shimmering outline of a door. "Let us go."

Coraline's hand closed around an invisible handle, and pulled the door open, revealing more stairs.

"By the way," said Bolormaa, falling into step beside Coraline as the four moved onwards, "How did your hair become blue?"

"My hair … ? Oh. It's dyed. You know, give it a new colour. I just chose blue because I thought it would look good."

"I approve," said Bolormaa firmly. "Blue is a holy colour to the sky father. We shall need his favour."

The new stairs were steeper, and darker, and had no handrail at the side to protect the incautious from a sudden plummet. Winds howled in the dark as the group progressed, giving each other support.

It was a longer journey as well, and dragged on for what seemed like hours.

"You'd think the Necronomicon would think to install a handrail after the first hundred years," Coraline quipped thirty minutes in.

"It isn't a patch on the Caliph's palaces, I'll say that much," said Azad dryly, heaving himself over a heavy stone ledge and helping Coraline up over the same, his scabbard scraping against the stone.

"I never thought I'd become nostalgic for wide-open grasslands," said Bolormaa, nearly slipping on a damp patch of moss, "But these stairs are achieving the impossible. We should congratulate them."

"Allah be merciful," spluttered Abdul, pulling himself over a high step with some difficulty, "But are we complaining about the stairs on our way to confront an ancient and unstoppable evil? I just want clarity on this, are we in fact doing that?"

"In our defence," called Coraline, some dozen steps ahead, "They're _really_ bad stairs."

The door this time was a welcome relief.

They stumbled through it, and the scenery this time was decidedly different.

They were within a corridor of a castle, the walls made from a cosy brown stone with torches blazing in brackets along the wall. These, along with a vertical gash to the outside at the end of the corridor, provided all the light. At the end of the corridor, two wooden doors studded with iron nails faced one another, with a fainting moaning coming from the one on the left. Under the arrow-slit, a man kneeled.

He rose as Coraline came through, and turned and faced her down behind the slits of a greathelm. He wore plate armour, the steel shining in the soft light. His torso and upper legs were covered by a white mantle bearing a black cross, and his hands rested on the pommel of a forty-inch longsword, its tip resting on the stone floor. Metal wings, coloured black and gold, protruded from the sides of his helm.

"Another poor soul comes to test their mettle against the _Necronomicon_," he said in a deep, slow, sorrowful voice, given a metallic timbre by the helm. "I pray for your good fortune in this endeavour. But I pray equally that you will turn back while you still have the chance. This is a foe beyond your deepest nightmares that you choose to face."

"I've heard that before, but it hasn't sunk in yet," said Coraline with a touch of impatience. "I'm Coraline Jones. Azad told me that a knight had taken on the _Necronomicon_. I take it you're him?" Behind her, the others squeezed their way through the door and into the corridor.

"Azad? Oh, the Moslem. You are correct, in that I was a knight. I am Konstantin von Eisenstein, a former knight-commander in the Teutonic Order. Have you heard of us? I imagine that much has happened between your days and mine."

"Er," said Coraline. She had heard of the Templars, and that they were one of the orders of knights involved in the Crusades, and there might have been Hospitallers in the mix as well, but she hadn't heard of the Teutonics.

"We were one of the crusading orders in the Holy Lands, set up to safeguard the passage of pilgrims to the holy places. We were an order based in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. When the last crusade failed in 1291, and we crusaders lost the city of Acre..."

"Good," snapped Azad, kicking a piece of moss off his boot. "It was never yours in the first place."

"None of you heathens have any claim to any portion of God's kingdom-on-earth," spat the knight, his voice rising and eyes flaring behind the helmet. "It was our duty to purge you from the Holy Lands."

"Your _duty_? Your duty to slaughter civilians and kill the faithful, your duty to desecrate all that was sacred, your duty to attack the innocent? You massacred the people of Jerusalem and Antioch on the dictation of a madman in Rome."

"It was the Moslems who attacked the Byzantines first," retorted Konstantin. "And it was the Byzantine emperor who pleaded for our help while you ravaged his lands and butchered his army at Manzikert. It was you ..."

"For god's sake, some perspective here would help!" yelled Coraline suddenly, cutting across the argument like a knife. "All this is centuries dead and buried. It shouldn't have to matter now, least of all when all our lives hang in the balance. I don't care what you two fought for or what you did or how you justified yourself or anything! The only thing that matters now, the _only_ thing, is fighting the _Necronomicon_. Can't you work together on that at least?"

The fires from the torches churned and spat at the air as the crusader and mujihad stared each other down, their eyes not moving, their hands on their sword handles. Then they stepped back, Azad releasing his sword and Konstantin relaxing.

"We shall resume our discussion at a later date," Azad said without as much rancour.

"I shall look forward to it," said Konstantin. "Now, where was I in my tale?"

"You'd lost Acre," said Coraline.

"After that defeat, our order's holdings were in the German lands, including the subdued Prussian states. And we soon set our sights on a new people deserving of a crusade. The pagans in the east of Europe and around the Baltic, who spurned the path of the cross and invited God's scourge. I was young at the time we went to war against the pagans in the east, and I rose to the rank of knight-commander. We waged a bloody and brutal campaign through the Baltic's forests and towns, and we crossed swords with the Lithuanians and the Magyars and the Rus and a thousand other godless peoples."

"We even found the leavings of the Mongols when they had sent their hordes through the regions, and even a few shattered remnants of their people. As I and my unit purged many of these remnants and other heretics we encountered, I began to notice signs of a whole network of different cults of heathens working to repulse us from these anarchic lands. Their attacks were organised, they worked together, we encountered and killed messengers going between the different factions."

"During the winter of 1338, my force sacked a small fort that we believed served as the hub for the heretic resistance. We attacked during a snowfall, under cover of darkness, and I led my guard into the central keep after cutting our way through the sparse resistance. I cleaved their leader in two after a fierce battle in his hall, and I permitted my men and hired mercenaries to help themselves to the valuables in the fort. One of the crossbowman retrieved a old book from the desecrated chapel, intending to sell it to one of the priests amongst our entourage."

"As we camped for the night amongst the ruins of the fort, we were beset by a mighty force of heretics that emerged like a legion of ghosts from the blizzard. They were not only men, but also seemed to hold demons amongst their ranks, terrible winged beasts and great tangles of flesh and tentacles. They outnumbered us three-to-one, and we had to fight like demons ourselves to have any hope of victory. At the end of that long, cold, bloody night, I was the only one left standing, surrounded by the corpses of my soldiers and knights and priests, as well as the corpses of cultists and demons. I sighted the book looted by the crossbowman next to his sundered body, and as my gaze drifted across it, the lettering on the cover unnaturally shifted to form _Necronomicon_. I became certain then that it was an unholy book, one revered by the devil's minions, and I suspected that it could secrets on the cults that I could use against them and the monsters they had brought with them. My will was strong, my faith was pure, my sword was sharp. What had I to fear?" Konstantin laughed a bitter laugh. "And you know the rest, I fancy."

Coraline looked around the castle corridor. "Is this the fort where you fought?"

Konstantin's face darkened behind the helmet. "No, it is … something else altogether. I … I was not a perfect knight. We are not permitted to take a spouse, but there was a woman I loved, and who loved me in return. We married in secret, and I arranged for her to have a good posting at Koenigsberg, and I visited her as often as I could. I even considered renouncing my knightly vows for her, when she told she was pregnant with our child. But during the birth … something went wrong, and though I raced to the birthing chamber as fast as I could, I could not enter for fear of revealing myself as the father and disgracing us both. And I did nothing but stand outside as she screamed for ten hours straight, crying out for myself or God to come to her. And at the end, I buried her and our stillborn child with my bare hands in the castle's orchards. The next month, I assumed control of a force of knights and mercenaries and never looked back. And now the _Necronomicon_ has seen fit to place me outside that chamber for all eternity, forever and always hearing my wife and child die. _And I shall have its blood for this_." Konstantin's hands locked tight around his blade on that last pronouncement, and his eyes became cold lights behind the helmet's slits.

Never, thought Coraline, had she seen such fury in a pair of eyes.

"If you wish me for your crusade, Coraline Jones, then I shall march with you to the gates of Hell and back. I will punish the Necronomicon for daring to exist in our world, for it exceeds the devil in its evil."

"I hear you," said Coraline softly. "Don't worry. I don't intend to go easy on it."

"Then let us depart through this door," said Konstantin, rapping the door on the corridor's right, "And leave this place behind."

The five walked through into what could only be called a staircase by the most generous of definitions. It was a series of wooden planks set into a rising spiral, with at least a foot's distance of empty space between each damp plank. Rough holes in the wall served as handholds.

Bolormaa took the lead, moving quickly and nimbly up the planks, with Abdul close on her tail. Coraline followed cautiously, keeping a firm grip on the wall and moving slowly and deliberately onwards and willing herself to _not look down no matter what_. Azad was behind her, his chainmail restricting him and making his progress hard. Konstantin lurched at the back, the planks creaking in as alarming a fashion as possible under his plate armour. The small field of vision provided by his helmet didn't help him either.

The only thing that could be said in the staircase's favour was that it was relatively short, with the exit rising into view after a mere twenty minutes of struggling and slipping and assorted terrors in the dark.

The latest room fitted all the classical definitions of hell apart from the absence of brimstone or cackling imps. The sky was filled with black smoke and angry red clouds that warped and merged together in the atmosphere. Blackened, smoking ruins jutted from the ground, with corpses in varying states of defiled-ness scattered everywhere, lying on the ground and impaled on scorched posts. Flies buzzed and fires roared across the tortured city in all directions.

In the middle of a desolate street, a man and a woman huddled together on a bare patch of ground, and at first didn't hear the group emerging from the door in the wall of a shattered house. They heard the various exclamations and shouts of disgust and fear however, and turned to face the group. The man was tall and wore clerical robes, and wore a gray turban over his dark hair. His face had the distinctive nose and jaw of the Alhazreds, though his eyes were a light shade of blue. The woman by his side wore a green hijab and a darker green dress and blouse. She was smaller than her husband, and her eyes were a deep shade of brown.

"Good day to you," said the man, extending a hand as Coraline drew close. "I am Hasan ibn Mahraz Alhazred, an iman and scholar of the Outer Realms."

"I am Faiza bint Sara Alhazred," said the woman. "May we safely assume that you too have come intending to destroy the Outer Gods?"

"You assume correctly," said Coraline, taking the hand offered. "I'm Coraline Jones. Er, this might sound like a strange question in any other circumstances, but what period in history are you from?"

Hasan and Faiza exchanged a look. "We wish to avoid confusion since we don't know whether we use the same calendar as you," said Faiza after a moment. "Am I correct in assuming you are American?"

"Correct."

"Then at the time we started reading the _Necronomicon_, a man called Carter was the president of your country. Does he sound familiar to you?"

"Carter!" exclaimed Coraline. "Then you're only about thirty years distant from my time! Are you Miss Alhazred's … sorry, are you Abra's mother and father?"

"You know her?" said Faiza with surprise. "Is she well?"

"She's well. She's part of an organisation that fights the Outer Realms."

"That's our daughter," said Faiza with approval.

"Truth be told," sighed Hasan, "We'd sooner that didn't happen, considering why we read the _Necronomicon _in the first place. We hoped she wouldn't have to grow up in a world where such monstrosities existed, much less have to fight them."

"We'd met each other through the Outer Realms," said Faiza. "I'd studied them since my teens, and hunted them since my university days, and I met the Alhazreds when I followed up a lead in Saudi Arabia. Hasan's family had long been cursed and preyed upon for the deeds of its ancestor..."

"Once again, I'm very sorry about that," said Abdul. "But I genuinely didn't know that would occur down the generations."

"Give your worthless apology to my brother-in-law," snapped Faiza, "Except that you can't, because a damn shoggoth snatched him off the street and … "

"Peace, Faiza," murmured Hasan, winding his hand around hers. "We met and married because of mutual interests regarding the Outer Realms, and we planned to meet up with a group we heard was forming in America. But our research progressed to the point where we managed to pinpoint the location of the true _Necronomicon_. We found it in an old abbey in Lithuania, paid the abbot a healthy amount for it, and spirited it back to Arabia, using whatever sorcery we had to mask its presence."

"Our original plan was to link up with the Americans and share it with them," said Faiza, "I was pregnant at the time, so our plan was to leave our child with Hasan's parents and then go to America. But when the girl was born..."

"We re-evaluated our plan, and forgot to be foes of the Outer Realms in our haste to be parents," said Hasan ruefully. "When I first saw Abra in her mother's arms, well … I felt equal parts joy and anger. Joy that we had brought something so beautiful into the world. And anger that the creatures of the Outer Realms dared to share that same world. We decided there that if we gleaned the knowledge to destroy the gods then, we could create a world in which our daughter, and all the daughters of the world for that matter, could live at peace. And we believed that, with our experience and knowledge, we could beat the _Necronomicon_ on its own ground."

"We left Abra with Hasan's parents while we prepared to begin reading. They knew the perils, and begged us to reconsider, but we were determined. And we paid the price for our arrogance," said Faiza.

"The _Necronomicon_ placed us here, presenting us with our ultimate horror. Failure." said Hasan. "A world ripped apart by the Outer Gods. A dead world, in which all our work and all the development of civilisation and humanity and life itself came to naught. A nightmare not just for us, but for all."

Coraline looked around at the burning buildings. She alone knew how close that nightmare was to fruition.

"That's what's going on right now," she said. "Earth is under attack right now, and I'm trying to stop them before this nightmare becomes a waking reality."

"Then what are you talking with us for?" whispered Faiza in rapt horror. "Quickly, you must press onwards. We are the last victims. Between here and its heart, there is nothing but whatever servants the _Necronomicon_ has gathered to itself. The door is over here," she said, ushering them over to a door that had once done sterling duty as the portal for a small neighbourhood greengrocers.

"And so the _Necronomicon_'s history in full is known to you," commented Abdul to Coraline as they stepped over broken glass and scattered limbs. "It was written by me and gained the power and malevolence of an Outer God. It remained in Arabia for centuries until the Mongol invasion shepherded it north to the Baltic realms. It corrupted many there, hung around for further centuries until taken briefly back to Arabia, and then transported to America, where it claimed you. It claimed myself, my son, one of a race of warriors, a knight-at-arms, and two dedicated hunters of the Outer Realms. An impressive track record."

"For a given value of "impressive"," said Coraline, unsure where Abdul was going with this.

"My point is," said Abdul, gesturing at the ruins around them, "Are you still determined to go on, knowing what it does? What it will do to you, given the chance, and what it has done to others? In spite of its power, are you still resolved to do this?"

"I'm not a quitter," said Coraline. "Heck, now that I know the sort of thing it does, I'm more determined to stop it than ever. I don't know if I'll win or not, but if I don't try, who else will?"

"Nobody, I imagine," said Abdul with a smile. "You still do not fail to impress me, Coraline. When did you first encounter the Outer Realms, if I may ask?"

"A Beldam tried to steal my soul and kidnapped my parents," said Coraline, drawing upon the memories that now seemed so distant. "I took my parents back, kicked it in the face, and me and my friend dropped its hand down a well."

Abdul decided that, all things considered, further commentary would be redundant.

Hasan opened the last door.


	22. Dream Quest, Pt 4

_He drifted through the abyssal tides, weakening all the while as he struggled against the vast force pushing mindlessly against him._

_That he – Ulthar the Gathering Storm, the Nine-Lived Sovereign, the custodian of the Great Old Ones and the fiercest and most implacable foe the Outer Gods had ever known – had been reduced to a scrap of thought thrown about on eldritch winds was an affront to his stature. It wasn't entirely unforeseeable, of course; Nyarlathotep had won a thousand battles against other Elder Gods, but it rankled regardless._

_Nyarlathotep had grown bored with Ulthar after a while, concluding that the last of the Elder Gods was as broken as he was going to get, and had tossed him into the void. And since then, Ulthar had been drifting through the Outer Realms. But he had not been drifting aimlessly._

_He had bound the Great Old Ones once when Earth's continents were young, and he had acted as their jailer ever since. He had remained at his post as the other Elder Gods, rebels against their amoral kin, had died in unseen battles across the cosmos. And he had nurtured on Earth the species that could have risen to finish the job the Elder Gods started. Humanity had risen slowly, slow even by the standards of the immortals. But once they started rising, they rose with an energy and skill unprecedented in all the species Ulthar had seen. A million years ago, a mere twinkling in the eyes of the universe, they had still huddled in caves, hiding in the darkness from predators. And then they had discovered fire, then iron, then farming, and they had risen to become the undisputed rulers of the world._

_Such potential. Such energy. Such a capacity for destruction that, if harnessed and directed outwards at the blind gods that delighted in cruelties to those who could not defend themselves, could reforge reality for the better. But they were still not ready. What he could divine as he drifted through unreal winds suggested they were giving a good showing of themselves, but they would lose in time. A tiny flare of hope amidst the infinite darkness of the universe risked being extinguished forever, and the next sapient species to evolve elsewhere would not have the fortune of an Elder God looking over their development. They would be snuffed out without a fight._

_But the human girl he had aided over the summer had not stopped herself after her victory. Ulthar knew that she now challenged the Necronomicon, the god created by humans, and that she risked her utter destruction for the power it offered to save her kind._

_Ulthar reached a focal point amidst the swirling chaos, and …_

_...shifted..._

_...and with a blurring and a crack of power and a susurration in the texture of the air of the last corridor within the Necronomicon, Ulthar slipped past its defences and settled in his favoured form; that of a battered, blue-eyed and black-furred cat._

_The power of an Elder God was breakable. But their honour was not._

_

* * *

_

"What's that?" said Bolormaa, stopping and pointing at something in an alcove's shadowed depths. The group stopped with her and scrutinised the space with varying levels of wariness.

"Whatever it is, it is not large enough to be a threat." declared Konstantin.

"You've never encountered a zoog, have you?" said Faiza, faint fires flickering around her outstretched hand.

"A what?"

"Wait," said Coraline, who lead the group in the narrow stone corridor, "It's moving. I think its..." Whereupon her jaw dropped at seeing the cat. The same cat who had helped her in the Other World and whom she had used as an improvised weapon against the Other Mother. She hadn't seen it since she had returned to Ashland, and she had supposed it might have left after seeing off the Other Mother. But here it was, walking stiffly across the dark stone floor, fresh scars raised across its body, its eyes blazing like stars. She ran to it, her shadow warping under the light of the torches set along the walls.

+We should stop meeting like this,+ it said, stopping and sitting before her. She knelt down and met it at eye level.

"Call me cynical," began Coraline, "But you're more than just a cat that can hop between dimensions and speak to humans, aren't you?"

+You're more right than you know. We have a lot to discuss, and very little time.+

("Why is she talking to a cat?" said Konstantin, standing with the rest of the group at a respectful distance, as was appropriate for the latest quester. The seemingly one-sided conversation left them mystified.

"There are worse animals to talk to," shrugged Azad. "They are blessed creatures."

"Give me a wolfhound any day," muttered Konstantin. "Dogs are loyal and useful. Cats are vermin-chasers."

"How typical of you franks, to glorify brute function and turn away from beauty and culture."

"I'll glorify my sword's brute function right now, you heathen piece of...")

+When I want to converse with you,+ came the cat's voice, clear as a bell and cutting across their conversation like a knife through butter, "I shall let you know. Likewise, if I want to hear your informed discourse while I'm in the middle of a conversation, I'll let you know. Otherwise, kindly keep your mouths clamped shut.+

Azad and Konstantin stared, surprised at the cat's sudden speech (but not too surprised: talking cats only have so much novelty value compared to some of the things encountered in the Outer Realms) and stayed silent.

+Events have been occurring at a rapid pace in your world. Time flows differently here compared to there, and on Earth, it has been two weeks since you started reading the _Necronomicon_.+

"_Two weeks?_" breathed Coraline. "God. What's happened?"

+Millions have died on the frontlines of war. Tens of millions more have died from food shortages or drought or adverse weather brought on by Outer Realms energies. And hundreds of millions have died in pitched slaughters in the cities. Humanity's remnants fight bitter guerilla warfare across the plains of Eurasia and Africa and in the jungles of South America. They use atomic weapons with no inhibition, rely on conscription to maintain their flagging manpower, and make the Outer Realms pay a bloody toll for every step they take. Closer to your home, Lovecraft has returned with an army and aids in the defence of your palace. He had returned just in time, for Cthulhu has assembled his own host and marches on Oregon as we speak. Nyarlathotep, whose day of reawakening draws near, has called upon Yog-Sothoth to wipe your kind from the world. The endgame nears, the fires across the world blaze at their fiercest, and the Strange Aeon is upon you. In a nutshell.+ A few minutes to let it sink in for Coraline were needed, and given.

"Then I'll ask no more questions," she said flatly after a few minutes. "We haven't got time. This ends now or never, before anyone else dies. Will you help me defeat the Necronomicon?"

+Gladly.+

And there were no more words spoken in the narrow corridor. The group moved on the distant open doorway with a single mind, their hands on their weapons.

Coraline took the front, her rapier hilt clenched in her hand, the cat trotting beside her. Azad and Konstantin strode side by side behind her, their hands on the blades in their scabbards. Behind them was Bolormaa, who had several long iron darts in her belt, and Abdul, who had produced an long obsidian knife, and Faiza and Hasan, fires stirring in the palms of their hands

After a few long minutes, they stopped before the open doorway, from nothing could be seen but a soft white light which streamed through. It gave the end of the corridor a serene and almost holy air. Even the whispering had fallen silent.

**Come, my children**, came the voice of the _Necronomicon_, level and light to match the atmosphere. **Come and test yourselves in search of my secrets.**

The silence was broken by the rush of swords being drawn, and loud footsteps towards the doorway.

**AND COME AND FIND YOURSELVES WANTING AS YOU FAIL AND BREAK AND BEG FOR A DEATH THAT WILL NEVER COME, STORM-BRINGERS!**,came the sudden roar of the exulting _Necronomicon_, as they charged through the gates of hell revealed.

Smoke and fire replaced the light as they breached the entrance, the air thick with fumes and the ground slick with embers and ash. Coraline choked on the air, half stumbling blindly forwards and half being being pushed forward by Konstantin, the cat racing forward at her heels. The smoke curled before her, and she saw a mob of shapes charging towards them. The horrors that guarded the inner sanctum of the Necronomicon were upon them, and she grabbed for her sword and swung it up at the first oncoming thing.

"Cut me a path!" she screamed above the sudden clamour of battle. "Cut me a path to the Necronomicon!"

"Charge!" screamed Azad, his falchion sweeping out and down in a silver smile across the stomach of a ten-foot high creature bristling with tentacles. Black ichor gouted from the stroke as the gurgling beast lurched backwards, and Azad sprang forward to the fore of the melee, his sword weaving a wall of steel in the air. "Fight for your world, sons of earth! _Allahu Akbar_!"

Konstantin ploughed forward with his sword levelled, skewering writhing monstrosities that screeched and lashed at his armour with sickle-sharp claws. "For Jerusalem and the Christ-on-Earth!" he roared, ripping out the blade with a spray of blood and bringing it crashing down upon the next gibbering beast, decapitating it with one brutal stroke. To his left, Abdul side-stepped a bullrushing shoggoth and buried his knife in its sides, soaking himself in its guts as his face erupted to life with a feral and terrible glee. Bolormaa's darts whistled past heads and swept at hair strands, and cracked into the throats of the endless creatures, stabbing out with them as they drew near. Overhead, sorceric fire and lightning arced from the hands of Hasan and Faiza and crackled and tore into the masses.

Coraline leapt through the chaos, striking out wildly and stabbing at whatever drew near as she darted forward. Chivalry went to hell in that dark, chaotic chamber as eyes were punctured and throats were gashed and the floor swam with ashes and blood. A gangling creature, sinewy with muscle and blazing over its body with dark fire, leapt in front of Coraline with a screech of triumph and raised a great taloned hand, and gurgled and swatted at empty air as the cat pounced and gripped at its throat with silver-bright claws. Coraline rammed the sword through its exposed side, and swept it out to parry the lunge from a ghoul. The sword blurred in her hands as she fought without skill, without training, without anything approaching a rational line of thought; but with a fury that rose out of her soul and sparked off the end of her blade, so fierce was her onslaught. For a moment, she forgot herself in the din and thunder of that battle, as she acted on autopilot and struck out with the rapier, as she realised from a great distance that she was yelling her own battle cry to match those of Azad's and Konstantin's and Bolormaa's, a cry of "Detroit Lions for the League! Detroit Lions for the League!", her sword striking a harsh and bloody symphony to accompany it.

A part of Coraline that had almost been almost overwhelmed by the rising berserker yanked at her brainstem for attention and hollered "The _Necronomicon_! _Get to the friggin' Necronomicon_!" It struggled to the fore, and Coraline, finding herself on a sudden tranquil part of the chamber, turned and called, "Hold them here! I'll get to the Necronomicon!"

"Go!" yelled back Abdul, shoving a spider-thing into a pyre as his knife flashed in the smoke amidst a knot of the creatures. "Fight it, Coraline! Fight for Earth! Fight for yourself! And fight like the devil himself!"

Coraline turned back and sighted a doorway at the end of the room. With the cat at her heels, she charged forward through the shifting smoke, and ducked under a barbed tentacle, and rolled forward, and sprung for the opening...

..and landed in silence.

She picked herself, and checked that the cat was nearby and that she had her sword, which was by now soaked to the hilt with blood. The space she found herself in reminded her of the edges of the Other Mother's world, with white emptiness stretching to infinity. She stepped forward cautiously, and was rewarded with a slow clapping from the blankness in front of her.

"Well fought," said a figure slowing taking form as it emerged from the mist. It's voice seemed uncannily familiar. "Well fought indeed. Your courage, your determination in the face of all odds, your wit and luck and choice of allies has gotten you here, to the end of your journey. And now that you are here … now what?" And Coraline gasped involuntarily as the figure finally took shape as it stopped a few feet distant. It was her.

It was her wearing the dark jeans and starred sweater the Other Mother had made for her. It was her, but her voice wasn't the parody of her voice recorded on cameras or tape recorders, but the deeper and more confident voice she thought in. It was her with her hazel eyes replaced with glistening black buttons, and streams of dried blood were visible down her cheeks. A smirk crossed her face as she stepped towards Coraline.

"What will you do now?" said the Other Coraline. "Will you press on blindly, waving your sword and not stopping to think? Or do you not think the time is ripe for self-reflection?"

"To hell with you," snapped Coraline, her voice betraying a hint of a tremor, but it grew firmer as she spoke. She raised the sword. "I don't care what you try to look like or what you're trying to do; you're a creature of the Outer Realms, and I'll never trust you."

"Oh? But the cat is an Outer Realms creature, and yet you trust him," said the Other Coraline, gesturing at the cat next to Coraline's ankle, which hissed and arched its back.

"That's different. He's helped me in the past."

"And I can help you now. _Think_, Coraline," said the Other Coraline. "Think of what you have done to get this far. Think of what you have done to end up here at all. Must I explain?"

"I won't listen to you."

"You shall." The Other Coraline's voice acquired a harsh timbre with these words, one that didn't go away. "Give yourself perspective on this. How did this start? How did this whole chain of events start?"

"I don't..."

"It started because of _you_." The words hung, thick and accusatory in the air, before the Other Coraline pressed on. "When you defeated the Beldam, you attracted the attention of a Great Old One. And that Great Old One brought the matter to the attention of Nyarlathotep, who has a well-recorded distaste for loose ends."

"You..."

"And your parents died," hissed the Other Coraline. "Because of _you_, and your futile victory. The fruits of your triumph. Congratulations. A round of applause would be in order, if not for your crossfire. You're as much a murderer as Nyarlathotep, and you're even more careless."

Coraline reeled as her mind forced away the thought. Her, responsible for … No, it was a pathetic attempt to erode her morale, anyone could see that...

"And when you _fled_ to your friends in the order," snarled the Other Coraline, "You brought upon the hunt of Nyarlathotep, who sought merely to defend his own. It's because of _you_ that the war between the Outer Realms and earth took place. It is your fault that billions died in a war not of their choosing, your fault that your world will die, your fault that an unnecessary war started. And when it ends, you will be left responsible when there is nothing left of your world but _fire_."

The words hammered home, calculated and malicious, stabbing at Coraline's resolve and pushing at her self-doubt. Her fault that billions died. Her fault that her meaningless victory brought upon the genocide of humanity. Her fault that her mom and dad died...

_...the kitchen rose, red and evil, the forms on it painfully familiar, accusing her for them, bringing memories crashing through a numbing mental dam, promising her the hell that waited once the Necronomicon won..._

_The berserker rose..._

Coraline looked up, her eyes red with tears and anger.

"No," she growled, clenching her sword and fixing the Other Coraline (whose form almost seemed to be warping in the mist) with a look of undying loathing. "No. You and your kind preyed on humans since we stepped out of the deserts. You attacked us first. How _dare_ you pin the blame on us when we resist you? How dare you destroy our culture, our civilisation, our work of thousands of years that you presume to tear away with one damn swipe? To hell with you! I started this, and I'll finish this with the destruction of the Outer Realms when I defeat the _Necronomicon_! And I _will_ defeat you." Her eyes narrowed and her sword was still in the air. "Oh yes, I know what you are. You thought you could deceive me by pretending to be my subconscious or conscience or other self or whatever, but you were wrong. I know you when I see you, _Necronomicon_. I know you and I will kill you and I will take your power." She pointed the red-silver sword at her double's face, and the cat hissed and tensed.

"It'll start with swords," she said, as if in a dream. "And it'll end with a match of wills. And I've got you licked on both counts. Come on, then. I've brought the storm."

The _Necronomicon_ spat, and warped and cracked through the Other Coraline's form. Its eyes blazed with an unholy light. Its hands sprouted a sword blazing with black fire. It crackled with the power of the Outer Realms.

**A child and a broken Elder God as my challengers as the world ends. From dust your species emerged**, it growled in a voice deeper and older than sea-chasms, **And we shall turn you into less than that.**

It and Coraline screamed their battle cries and charged, their swords crashing against one another and their eyes locking as they summoned the energy to decide the battle for Earth.


	23. Storming the Palace

The earth was lit by a flash of lightning, casting deep shadows skittering along the white ground and turning the hail of bullets into a storm of white-hot specks. They tore back and forth between the lines, buzzing like a hornet swarm and sending sand and dirt and blood flying as they impacted.

From the west surged the cultists of the Pacific armada, their numbers bolstered by spear-brandishing Deep Ones and lumbering shoggoths and countless other monstrosities of the Outer Realms. Bullets and shells and javelins hissed through the harsh light to the Pink Palace's defences, and the return fire cut bloody swathes through the packed horde.

Lovecraft kneeled behind a sandbag while bullets whickered overhead, absent-mindedly playing with the fires dancing in his palm. Beside him crouched Zann and Danforth, each clutching large swords.

"Incoming!" screamed a ranger beside them, his gun blazing into the horde. Those in front crumpled, those behind charged on over their bodies.

"One," said Lovecraft to himself, as Danforth and Zann tensed and hefted their swords.

"Two," as the thundering of oncoming feet grew in volume.

"Three." And as the first Deep One leapt over the sandbag barrier on powerful legs, it loosed a triumphant croak that suddenly turned into a bellow of anguish as a gout of fire roared up from Lovecraft's hand and immolated it in mid-air.

"What depressingly predictable creatures," said Lovecraft as its ashes fell around him and Zann and Danforth's blades lunged at the first wave. The tide of cultists and creatures crashed into the western barriers, and into the bristling bayonets and swords of the rangers and order members.

* * *

From the east came the demons of Oregon. The Brethren of the Sundered Gaze formed the vanguard, screaming mad cries and hymnals to the dark gods as their guns barked and tore into the eastern defences. The chatter of machine guns and the soft _thwip-thwip_ of bullets hitting sandbags filled the air, and the screams of zealots and wounded alike rose into the sky.

The sea of red uniforms charged up through the forest and scrub, spitting a storm of lead up at the Pink Palace and ignoring the returning fire of the rangers. Up at the Pink Palace, Spink, Forcible, Miss Lovat, and Mr Bobinsky laid down a withering hail of sniper fire on all sides, while the Chinese troops and ANG clustered around the base provided covering fire down towards the enemy.

Wybie stood at attention on the porch, clenching his rifle tightly to stop his hands from shaking. Looking out, he saw the endless tide of the Outer Realms bringing all its power to bear on the Pink Palace. From within, he heard eldritch howling from the study. Whatever Coraline was doing in there, it sounded as though serious amounts of power were being unleashed around her. Enough power to shudder the universe.

* * *

From the south came two Great Old Ones leading a vast host of Outer Realms creatures. They poured over the dark mountains like a ravening tide, and distant oncoming nightgaunt swarms blotted out the few patches of light that filtered down through the storm clouds. Summanus the Living Shadow, a flickering form of void-energy and black tendrils, darted across the earth, whilst Cthugha the Burning One rocketed through the sky as a form of pure blazing fire.

"As soon as they're in charging distance," roared Olney above the clamour of war, to the two rangers standing behind him. "Go for the shadowy one. You know what to do."

Ranger Corporals Dunn and Zimmerman exchanged uneasy looks, their hands clenching and unclenching. Dunn, having been an instructor in Modern Army Combatives and having proved himself in bloody close-quarters battle in Ashland, and Zimmerman, being a fencing master and possessing a mameluke sword, had both been chosen by Olney to help him engage the first Great Old Ones to reach the Palace. Great Old Ones, according to Olney, could sometimes warp the mechanisms in guns and complex machinery with their mere presence. Warping fists and lengths of steel was another matter.

At a cry of "Now!" from Olney, just as Summanus was sixty feet away and nearing, the three leapt over the barrier and made a beeline for the Great Old One, the volleys of bullets from the rangers covering their approach. Dunn's fists were already raised, Zimmerman's sword was out and flashing, Olney had manifested two knives and his soul was hard on their heels. Summanus's leading tendrils reared as if in challenge, and then lunged forwards, crackling through the air with unnatural silence and speed. Cthugha thundered overhead to the Pink Palace, its passage singing the hairs on the rangers' heads.

Olney's knives blurred and shredded the tips of two of Summanus's tendrils and sent them recoiling back to the dark nimbus that was the centre of Summanus. Another tendril curved down towards the two rangers, and was swiped away by the mameluke sword slashing upwards and colliding with a burst of sparks and splatter of ichor. A roar of pain and anger rumbled out from the god, which seemed to retract into itself, the tendrils shrinking into around the central form.

"Go for the..." started Olney as he leapt with knifing range, and finished with a winded "Erk," as Summanus exploded outwards with the force of a tempest and one, two, a dozen tendrils cracked across his chest and carried him back, his limbs flailing like those of a broken puppet in the air, his knives falling to the ground.

Dunn leapt under the wave of tendrils, and a knife leapt into his hand as he dove at Summanus's heart. But as he brought the knife forward, Summanus simply slapped it aside with a tendril and brought his bulk forward, crashing into Dunn and ramming him to the ground under the shadowy mass. As he opened his mouth to yell in pain, a tendril flashed into his mouth, followed by another, and then another, and countless tendrils were flying at any orifice exposed. For one moment they rushed down and inwards and coiled into and around the struggling Dunn.

Then they ripped outwards, and the scraps of Dunn flew in all directions. The tendrils rose once more...

...And Olney's soul and Zimmerman's blade were there, one seizing and ripping at a handful of shadow-stuff, the other slashing down and hacking open the shadow. Eldritch fire flared from the wound, and the pained rasp from Summanus came accompanied with a tendril-stroke that sent Zimmerman flying to the right. The soul seized at the shadow again, and then erupted in shrieking wreathes of golden fire as a tendril whipped out and rammed through its centre, raising it into the air as it writhed and crumbled and sparked. The tendril rose further, intending to slam the dying soul down into the hard earth.

As it rose, Olney rose also, picking himself and a knife up and stepping forwards like an avenging spectre. His eyes were cold, his knife was held downwards and out, his tongue murmured arcane phrases. His fist was tight around a little jar of sand drawn from his inside pocket.

"Haa'arachh t'ulka saeacth alarag..."

Summanus reacted too late. As one tendril sliced down to Olney's neck, he was already plunging forward and bringing his knife out and up and down across the opened wound, ripping it open further and setting the inner fires churning and spitting at the air. He arced his back, sang out the last of his incantation, and drew upon the last of his life and energy to ram the blazing jar into Summanus's wound.

Once the fire and thunder had died away, and the ringing in his ears and the scorching pain across his back had eased slightly, Zimmerman picked himself up off the burnt earth, and hefted his sword as the tide of Outer Realms creatures descended. They had been weakened and slowed by the destruction of one of their gods, but they were still countless in number and terrible in their fury.

Zimmerman's world focused down to that horde, and to his strength, and to his sword. Funny, that everything seemed so simple in these sorts of situations...

The battle raged and the remains of a god burned behind him as Zimmerman charged.

* * *

The western wall blazed with battle. Along its length, rangers fought cultists with bayonet and pistol and order members fought the creatures from beyond with swords and knives and the precious jars of Kadath sand. The rangers and Chinese troops manning the inner perimeter fired into the horde, the countless bullets leaving a lattice of white-hot streaks in the evening air. The AA gun in the garden chattered into the snow-swept sky and ripped into the nightgaunt swarms, spent rounds falling to the ground amidst crushed tulips.

At the westernmost point on the perimeter stood Lovecraft, one hand grasping a machine pistol that spat lead into knots of cultists and Deep Ones, the other blazing with sorceric fire. Swathes of fire swept into the horde, immolating dozens, and the smell of burning flesh filled Lovecraft's nose as his eyes came alive with a mad battle-lust.

To his left stood Sergeant Foley and a team of rangers, standing behind the wall and calmly standing their ground as they kept their rifles levelled. The arc of ground before them was covered in corpses and flying limbs and blood droplets and grenade explosions and striking bullets. To his right stood Danforth and Zann, their swords dancing through the battle, lunging in silver arcs across the sky and hewing down through flesh and bone with every strike.

Beyond the perimeter was the teeming ranks of the horde, bristling with upheld rifles and spears and totems. Corpses dangled from these, foul phrases and images carved into the skin. The cultists, reduced to mindless drones, surged onwards blindly into swathes of fire and stabbing bayonets. And behind them, a mile distant and mercifully obscured by the blizzard, Cthulhu perched atop a mountain and waited for the end.

* * *

_In the white void between worlds, Zoth-Ommog the Dweller in the Depths, the Gate Breaker, the Beldam King, hovered before an unexceptional spot of blankness._

_Unexceptional, that was, except for where it would lead his servants, who waited with eager anticipation in the void behind him._

_He focused once, and his entire monstrous form warped and and dissolved and coalesced into the shape of a small doorway. The energies surrounding him took a moment to settle, and then the door slammed open. It opened onto darkness, which then accelerated back and became the end of a rapidly lengthening corridor, the walls of which glowed with blue-purple light. It slowed and then stopped with a crash of sparks, and the darkness shifted into another doorway. The corridor rippled with one last burst of fire, and the door exploded open._

_+Kill the girl. Kill all in your path. Burn their palace from the inside out and avenge your sister.+_

_The Beldams let out a triumphant cry at their lord's command, and scuttled forward and through the opening as a swarm, their needle-sharp claws clacking and eyes flashing with an unholy light._

_

* * *

_

Wybie braced himself as Cthugha rocketed towards the palace. Tongues of flame seared the ground as it sped onwards, scorching through machine gun nests and sending soldiers screaming and fleeing. It shrugged off the bullets fired at it, it ignored the sniper fire from the top of the Pink Palace, and its inexorable advance combusted the trees in its wake, which exploded into a thousand flaming splinters.

Wybie aimed down his rifle's sight and opened fire, hoping against hope that he could kill it before it reached the palace, but it didn't stop, it seemed to swallow the bullets, and the roar of oncoming flames matched the chatter of his gun and the thundering of his heart as it came closer and closer and filled the universe with its fury...

Jack stepped forward from the door opening, from where he had been deflecting shots that could have punched into the Pink Palace, and cracked his knuckles.

"Go and make sure the living room's secure. I felt something happen there," he said in a matter-of-fact way. "I've got this." And before Wybie could answer, the sorcerer leapt forward with his tome in hand and his pointed finger blurred as it sketched two intersecting lines in the air, which sprang forward and buckled across Cthugha, slowing and surprising it enough for the lines to rapidly multiply in the air, forming a cage which blazed with magical energy.

Wybie, realising the order given to him after a sudden shocked moment, turned and sped into the Pink Palace just Cthugha exploded outwards, ripping at the cage and sending out flames to engulf Jack. The door slammed shut on Wybie's back, dulling the sound of magical battle. He raced down the corridor, the light flickering overhead and dust drifting from the ceiling as a rocket exploded into the ground on one side of the house.

He slowed down as he neared the end, and turned to the shut door leading to the living room, and from behind he could hear a faint scraping and clicking.

Sweating with fear, he slung the rifle across his back and drew out a pistol. Grasping it with one hand, he reached out for and turned the door knob.

The door swung open, revealing the living room. The chairs and sofa sat at the side, making room for the boxes of barbed wire and empty crates of ammunition that covered much of the floor. The tall lamp sat next to the little door. The little door, Wybie seemed to realise from a great distance, was wide open, and _shapes_ scuttled in the darkness behind it. Most salient of all the room's features, however, was the figure that stood before the door.

It wasn't the same Beldam that Coraline had fought, though Wybie couldn't have recognised it to begin with. It seemed more masculine than feminine, with slightly broader shoulders and a narrower waist from which six metal spider-legs extended. Its hair hung on its head like dark strips of seaweed, and curved down the sharp jawline to form a beard. Bright silver button-eyes shone out of sallow patchwork skin, and a serpentine smile revealed rows of teeth gleaming like bullets.

"Hello, little thing," the Beldam said in a scratched, hissing voice, its smile deepening and its needle fingers on one hand extending towards Wybie. "I am the hundredth child of the Beldam of Derry," and its needle fingers extended out with a metallic click, becoming as long and deadly as rapiers. "You helped kill my sister," and its smile grew terrible and feral on its thin face. "Prepare to die."

And it sprang at Wybie as his pistol flew upwards and discharged at its chest as other Beldams clawed their way out of the passage between worlds. The round punched through its heart and the creature fell limp in mid-air, crashing into Wybie in a mad tangle of slashing metal limbs and throwing him to the ground under it. Gasping with shock and pain from the impact and half a dozen cuts blossoming over his body, he kept the pistol aimed towards the door and fired again at the next Beldam to emerge. The shot flew overhead and cracked into the wall; and the new Beldam, shorter and with thicker, more powerful limbs than its sibling, crowed in triumph and started forward.

A volley of shots from the doorway ripped into its body, one punching into its throat, another lashing through its stomach, and the last ripping through its arm and sending the detached limb flying across the room. The Beldam staggered for a second, the fury in its dark red eyes undimmed, until a last shot threw it to the ground and kept it there. Miss Alhazred stood in the doorway, holding a smoking pistol and drawing a bead on the doorway.

"Ready to die for Earth, Wybie?" she asked, kicking the prone Beldam off him and helping him to his feet, and he stood unsteadily next to her at the door.

"No, Miss," he said, ignoring the pain stitching across his body and grasping his pistol with both hands. "Ready to kill for Coraline."

The wall around the little door suddenly exploded in an cloud of flying plaster and dust, and several Beldams scrambled out at once into the storm of bullets from Wybie and Miss Alhazred.

* * *

Nyarlathotep ticked off the minutes as war raged on Earth, and gave the matter of what he would do when his time would come some thought.

Would he materialise in his full glory, and show those upstart simians what it truly meant to wield the power of a god? Such a course of action appealed. Not even the order had anything with which it could fight an Outer God manifested in its full power. The girl was trapped with the Necronomicon, which, Nyarlathotep knew, was almost as cunning and deadly a being as himself. She could not win. Appearing as himself also meant that the destruction of this world would be over and done with in a matter of moments. He had promised that joy to Yog-Sothoth, but he could make amends later.

But if Nyarlathotep was honest with himself, he didn't want it to be over that quickly. Humans had been an excellent toy, with their penchant for destruction and their selective blindness that made it such a joy to reveal the true nature of reality to them and, of course, the capacity for every part of their bodies to feel pain. They were excellent to work with.

All good things had to come to an end, and Nyarlathotep had suspected he might have to end up scouring humanity from their planet before they got ideas above their station sooner or later. It was important then that he had one final chance to hurt them in the way that was most delicious and felt the most real. In a human host, where all the senses (limited and few in number, but wonderfully vivid) created the world around you, and where you could feel the hilt of a razor in your grasp as you had your fun.

He would appear to humanity one last time, Nyarlathotep decided then and there. He had merely to choose a suitable host.

Seconds passed in the Outer Realms. Long and bloody hours passed on Earth.

* * *

Lovecraft killed a cultist with one deft stroke to the neck from his knife, and ripped open a nightgaunt with an incandescent fist. He paused, heaving and gasping for breath, and looked round at the battlefield.

The struggle continued on all sides, but there was a sort of peace to the moment. The stacked bodies around the perimeter attested to the ferocity of the initial defence, and the bodies in some places rose higher than the wall. The first wave had been shattered on the defences, and the second wave gathered itself together in the distance.

But the cost had been great. Less than a third of the rangers were still in any state to the fight, and the Chinese, who had reinforced the defences at the height of the fighting, had been decimated. The civilian fighters, brave as they might have been, had died to the last man. Lieutenant Pargat's body, slumped over the eastern wall amidst piles of the Brethren of the Sundered Gaze, clenching an empty rifle in his death-grip, attested to the last stand of the ANG.

The order had fared little better. Zann, Pierce, Danforth, and many more had died on the western wall with weapons in their hands and fury in their hearts. Jack had vanished in a flash of white-hot light along with Cthugha, scouring a still-smouldering scar into the side of the Pink Palace. A lone sword-wielding ranger on the southern defences had led a charge of order members and rangers into the horde. They were all lost, but stopped the first wave on that side before any of the others. And for all their sacrifice, Lovecraft knew they had but fought the tiniest part of the mere vanguard of the forces assembled against them.

The dead lay, turning white with drifting snow. Half-seen through the screen of gently drifting snow stood the scattered defenders; some standing tall, others hobbling, some supporting others and bandaging wound. Sergeant Foley, his face drawn and his side slick with blood, stepped over the corpses towards Lovecraft, an uninjured Ramirez on his heels.

"We won't last another assault, sir," said the sergeant simply. "We're low on numbers, almost out of ammunition, and they've still got millions to throw at us."

"I know, sergeant. I never intended to win here. I just intended to buy time." Lovecraft sighed, and stuck the knife into his belt, and let the fires in his hand flicker away. His own body ached all over, cuts and bruises and old scars fighting for space on the few areas of skin. Beyond and up, the Pink Palace sat still and silent in the snow.

"When can we expect another attack?" said Lovecraft, turning and staring out to the northern mountains. He could vaguely feel something from there, something stirring and resonating across his bones...

"No less than three minutes. No more than five. I've ordered the wounded to be taken up beyond the innermost perimeter, and what ammo we have left has been distributed to all..."

"Wait, wait," said Lovecraft suddenly, craning his head in the direction of the mountains and waving a hand for silence. "Can you hear that?"

Foley turned and listened, trying to make whatever it was out above the howl of the wind and the distant moans of the dying. There almost seemed to be a deep rumbling, something that set his teeth on edge and sent a cold shiver down his spine.

"Sergeant," hissed Lovecraft in a low tone, "Go to Plan Omega."

"Shit," breathed the sergeant. "Ramirez, get the Stinger ready." Ramirez heaved the surface-to-air weapon off his back and hefted it as the rumbling increased in volume.

The snow-blurred mountains seemed suddenly to move, a great dark shape detaching from the side and picking its way to the Pink Palace. Scaled feet crushed trees underfoot, tentacles writhed in the air, baleful eyes fixed the Pink Palace with an unrelenting determination. Cthulhu moved in for the kill. He would finish this while the humans were weak and drained of spirit.

To the rangers, it was as if one of the mountains had decided upon their destruction. To Lovecraft, it was his last dance with an old foe. Cthulhu's charge echoed like thunder, and he loosed one roar that could have come from an active volcano.

Lovecraft reached for a walkie-talkie hanging from his belt, and it crackled to life as he lifted it to his ear.

"Marksman Bobinsky?" he began.

"_Da, Mr Lovecraft?_" came Bobinsky's static-laced voice.

"Plan Omega. To the north. Everyone fit to fire?"

"_Everyone is all right. Ahoy, ladies!_" Bobinsky called out to Miss Spink and Forcibe and Miss Lovat, all of them ensconced on the upper level. "_Plan Omega is in effect. Get out your sandy bullets!_"

"_Do you know, April, I don't believe that exact sentence has ever been used, and least of all in this context,_" Miss Forcible crackled over the line.

"_What sentence?_"

" "_Get out your sandy bullets." It's nicely absurd out of context, don't you think? Mind you, the context itself is rather odd..._"

"_Miriam, really, you do find the oddest things to talk about at a time like this..._"

"_Oh, hush, you pair,_" came the voice of Miss Lovat. "_Just lock it into here, and here we go. That's us loaded for bear. Or gods, rather._"

"_Wonderful!_" boomed Bobinsky. "_We are all ready, Mr Lovecraft. Just give us the signal when you need us._"

"As soon as you have a clear shot on his left side, fire away. We'll arrange that you'll get that." Lovecraft switched off and put away the walkie-talkie, and turned to the two rangers. "Whenever you're ready, gentlemen."

Ramirez raised the Stinger to his shoulder, and peered down the sight, waiting and tense with anticipation as the distant lumbering shape of Cthulhu edged closer, and closer, and closer. Sergeant Foley broke the silence first.

"RAMIREZ! SHOOT THAT SON OF A BITCH!"

_Whumph_, came the backdraft from the blast of the rocket, a white streak of light in the dark sky as it tore towards Cthulhu. The rocket's bright flare grew smaller and smaller as it roared through the snow, and receded to a tiny pinprick of light against the distant dark figure.

Then it exploded against Cthulhu's right forelimb. Modern machinery and fire ripped into aeons-old flesh and bone with a flash of heat and a conflagration of energy gouting out of the injured limb, and a roar of pain was torn from Cthulhu's throat as he stumbled to his right and landed hard on his injured leg, opening his left flank to the sniper fire from the Pink Palace.

Almost silent, barely seen shots blasted out of the sniper nests in the top of the Pink Palace, and four bullets sped towards Cthulhu.

Four bullets fired from high-powered rifles.

Four bullets which had been prepared in a laboratory under the House at Providence, and that had been filled with distilled and concentrated Kadath sand, and had been ensorceled and spell-bound by a dozen different order members working under shadow and secrecy, and which had been prepared specially for this eventuality.

Four bullets travelling in excess of a thousand metres a second, with attendant increased momentum.

They punched through Cthulhu's scaly hide, ripping through skin and flesh and sinew and organs and finally exploding at his core.

From the outside, Cthulhu merely staggered. From within, his vast mind was a miasma of agony, spider webs of pain stitching out into every corner of his being. He didn't think. He couldn't think. He could only lurch and stand mute in anguish. A tiny circle of cold emptiness appeared within him, and as it started to grow and leave him numb in its wake, he coldly realised what the humans had done to him.

They had shared their mortality, their greatest weakness bar morality, with the greatest and oldest of the Great Old Ones.

Cthulhu's mind and being unravelled into specks, and then micro-particles, and as the outermost parts of himself turned back into the void from which he had been spawned, he at last fully grasped what humanity had become.

They were no longer a sputtering and insignificant candle flame in infinite emptiness. They had grown. They had learned of their place in the universe. And they had made themselves into a blazing supernova of raw power and by the time the Outer Realms had learned of this, it was too late for their rise to be stopped.

And as Cthulhu died near the old well, his form bursting into eldritch fire and falling apart, he doubted whether it ever could.

Lovecraft and Foley and Ramirez looked out, silent and exultant, as Cthulhu's form burned from within and as the cheers from the Pink Palace were answered by a massed cry of despair and fury from the hordes without.

"Today, gentlemen, was a very good day indeed." said Lovecraft quietly, drawing out his knife and testing the edge with the tip of his finger, "Let's see that it finishes on a high note, shall we?"

Foley and Ramirez raised their guns once more, and the roar of the charging horde was matched by the thunder of the rifles.

* * *

The dead Beldams filled the living room. Scraps of twisted limbs and crushed torsos and detached, headless buttons covered the floor, and others were draped across the shattered crates and boxes. Miss Alhazred sat on one of the intact crates, her side bandaged and her face pale. Wybie leaned on the opposite wall, breathing heavily, with an empty pistol in each hand.

After the last wave of Beldams had fallen in the storm of bullets, the doorway had seemed to crackle and almost move forward into the room. Miss Alhazred had reached for a jar of Kadath sand, upon which the passage had remembered a pressing appointment elsewhere and had slammed back into the wall and had become red brick and mortar once again.

It was hard for Wybie and Miss Alhazred to tell how the battle was going from within the living room. But judging by the noise and sounds of gunfire and one huge death-roar that had come less than half a minute ago, it was still continuing at least. Major Song led the remnants of the Chinese outside around the Pink Palace, and the muted gunfire chattered and shook the windows.

Miss Alhazred stood up.

"I'll check on Coraline," she said. "Stay here in case that thing comes back."

Wybie had nodded, and she had glided through to the study, leaving Wybie alone.

He stared out at the window, at the drifting snow and the distant flashes of gunfire.

When the whisper came, he nearly leapt out of his chair.

_Why-were-you-born_, it whispered in Coraline's voice, _it's me. I need your help._

"C-C-Coraline?" he stammered, rising to his feet and looking around with scared, darting eyes. "What...where are you?"

_I'm sort of trapped between worlds, but I know how I can get back to Earth. I need your help, Wybie. I know how we can beat these monsters._

"I'll do anything," declared Wybie, drawing himself up as far as his scoliosis would let him. "What do you need me to do?"

_Think of anything, Wybie. Think of a pet, a stone, a family member, anything. Just so long as it's real, and you can hold it in your mind. It'll be a beacon for me. Think of it as hard as you can._

"O-Okay," he said, confused but unquestioning, and he focused on the mental image he had of his motorcycle. He could imagine that clearly enough, he had spent hours every day tinkering with and testing and improving the damn thing. It was easier than he imagined, and the gears and wheels and seat of the bike soon filled his mind.

"Now what?"

_Now … think of something else. Go back to normal._

Wybie shook himself out of the mental image, and tried to physically shake his head as well. He couldn't. Puzzled, he tried again, and couldn't. With mounting terror, he tried to step forward, wave his hand, blink, do _anything_, and he couldn't. His body no longer listened to him.

His own hand rose up without his bidding, and he found himself examining his own stretched fingers and flexing his arm, and his other hand reached for his skull-mask and slung it back down over his face.

_Wonderful_, came the voice that no longer sounded anything like Coraline, but was colder, crueler, and had a mocking edge to its flat tones that cut into Wybie's mind and made him want to hide or run or fight like a trapped animal. _Deception is always such a useful means of getting into someone's mind, I find. Making them focus on something, cutting off their thought to the parts you take over while their back is turned … it works all the time._

_Never fear, Wybie Lovat, _it continued_, I shall not wear you for long. Just long enough to finish my business here, to kill your allies, and to kill Coraline. I'll let you watch her die as your own hands do the deed. Would you like that?_

Wybie screamed a mental scream of horror, and threw himself at the boundaries of his mental prison, beating at the power ruling him with whatever emotion and determination he could bring to bear. But it was not enough, it would never be enough, and the binding on the last part of his free mind shrank and tightened and shrunk him further until it bit into him so badly it hurt.

_Disturb me no more_, the voice said in a curt tone, "For I have work to do," it finished with Wybie's own voice. His hands reached down to the ground for the dropped gun, and picked it up and examined it and loaded it and held it before him as footsteps came down the corridor.

Miss Alhazred opened the door and began, "She's still reading the ..." and then, seeing the skull-masked Wybie holding a gun at her, said, "Wybie...?" and was cut off by the gun firing. The bullet shot out and punched through her forehead and out the other side. She was dead before she hit the ground.

"A fair guess," said Nyarlathotep, running a hand along the gun's barrel, admiring the smoothness and deadliness of the weapon. "But nowhere near the truth, I'm afraid."

He stepped out into the hallway, and set his sights on the study door.

One last loose end, to be cut off where he had started.


	24. Apotheosis

Nyarlathotep reached for the closed study door -

* * *

Coraline's battle against the _Necronomicon_ ended in fire.

She had fought it blade to blade, and the clash of swords had echoed in the white void for what seemed like hours. It had mustered the skill it had gleaned from the memories of Konstantin and Azad and had pressed a precise and relentless assault every minute of the duel. It had met with the rising fury that filled Coraline and rolled off her in waves and struck at the Outer God with the silver slashing sword as its vessel. It could not pierce her defence, nor could it directly withstand her counterattacks, and its skin glistened from countless wounds. The cat danced at Coraline's side, its claws going snicker-snack as it lunged at and clawed at and dodged the _Necronomicon_. Ulthar was having the time of his life.

She had matched it will to will. It had summoned every part of its power and all of its vast and alien mind had roared around her will like a dark and hungry ocean, and had torn at and thrown itself against her in earth-shattering assaults again and again and again. But she had held her own against all the power the Outer God could bring to bear, and each wave of fury from the _Necronomicon_ had only shredded away the doubtful and distracting facets of her mind, exposing the steel core that held steady at her centre.

It no longer looked even remotely like her, having shifted and revealed its true form, or as least as accurate an impression of its form Coraline could glean with her rudimentary sight. The Other Coraline had cracked and faded away like peeling paint, and it was now a hole in the universe, a person-shaped _thing_ of utter nothing that hurt to look at. Constellations and black holes and dying stars glittered across its surface, reality reflecting their battle. It didn't speak or taunt her or state its grisly intentions, but from it came a deep and terrible howling that had only ever been heard in gale-streaked skies or at the bottom of chasms.

The howling filled the world for Coraline. She imagined it filling the universe, and she fought all the harder.

_Go for vulnerable areas_, Miss Alhazred had said before she had begun this insane journey. _Fight like the devil himself_, her ancestor had said just before she faced the _Necronomicon_ for real. Coraline heeded their advice, and brought the rapier's point slicing out and into the void-creature's groin (a blow that would have had more impact had there been anything there to strike) and she _tore_ the blade upwards with one mighty heave, ripping a gash open all the way to its gullet. She angled it forwards as it left the thing's body, and rammed it up through its blank face and through an empty eye-socket, punching through to the back of the skull. As this happened, she dashed aside its latest mental attack with almost contemptuous ease.

The howling shot up to a pitch that would have made glasses shatter and dogs on edge, and the _Necronomicon_ pulled away desperately from the vorpal blade, leaking a viscous oily substance from its wounds as it scurried backwards, the flaming sword held before it as if to stave off Coraline.

It was the first time in the entire history of the cosmos that an Outer God had ever tried to flee from a mortal; and flee it did, the shadow legs scrabbling for purchase on the empty ground as it accelerated backwards, looking for an exit, any exit.

"Oh no you don't," growled Coraline, running after it and spinning her rapier in her grasp. "Fight me! Fight me, you COWARD!" She charged forwards blindly, raging, unstoppable in her anger. The cat ran at her side, its eyes blazing with icy-blue fire.

She dove forwards, the rapier bright in her hands, just as the _Necronomicon_ turned and leapt backwards into the air, great wings of void-matter cracking out from its back. It slowed and stopped as it hovered ten feet in the air, and watched the oncoming Coraline like a hunting hawk. It angled its blade towards Coraline, and dove down at her in grim silence. The sword point hissed through the air, the crackle of fire thick around it.

Coraline spun to the side with a fraction of an inch to spare, twisting aside as the sword left a scorch line across her raincoat. She caught herself barely, and brought her sword upright too slowly, just quick enough to see the shadow-figure turning in the air with supernatural reflexes, and leaping forwards with the sword held overhead.

There was a black blur at Coraline's side and before she could blink, the cat pounced upwards at the _Necronomicon_'s ravaged face. Silver claws shot out and dug into the living shadow with a crack of clashing power, and the two gods struggled in the air as the _Necronomicon_ was borne backwards by the force of Ulthar's impact. It buckled into the ground, and the black sword lay dropped and forgotten on the ground as the battle raged. The _Necronomicon_'s wings lay crushed beneath it as Ulthar's claws slashed out and left weeping strokes across its head in a storm of violent motion.

One of the _Necronomicon_'s thrashing hands managed to seize the cat, and ripped it off its face and threw it away overarm. But before it could rise, Coraline appeared beside it, her sword pointed downwards.

She rammed it down, through shadow-skin and shadow-flesh and shadow-heart and into the ground below, impaling it in the earth with less than an inch of steel between skin and hilt. The _Necronomicon_ writhed like a pinned beetle, struggling to pull itself off the blade through sheer furious action, and it lashed out frantically with its mind.

Coraline's resolve met it, and battered it down. It rose again, and she broke it to the ground with one relentless mental swipe. She laid into it while it was down, pummelling at its soul and crushing it then and there, now and forever.

When she subsided, exhausted with effort, the _Necronomicon_ was barely more than a breathing corpse.

The adrenaline that had fuelled Coraline throughout the battle faded then, and she released the sword hilt and fell to her knees as the fatigue washed over her. The silver hilt remained upright, still as a banner. The cat picked himself up and trotted over to Coraline, limping as he went. Her listless hand reached and stroked down his back as he drew near.

"It's not over," she said. "It's never over. I still have to take its power and go back to earth. How do I do that?"

+You fought it in the mind as well as in the flesh, did you not?+

"Yes."

"Then do what you did then. Feel for it on the mental realm and defeat it finally there. Victory will yield to you all its power, and … well, you'll be able to take things from there."

Coraline caught her breath there, and frowned as she tried to dredge back the memory of what she had done in that contest of wills.

What had she done exactly? The crimson haze of battle-fury had seeped away, removing its incandescent clarity and leaving fog and confusion in its wake. She struggled through the haze of memory, groping for whatever it had been that had driven her in the titanic struggle, whatever had come instinctively to her to let her take on the _Necronomicon_ and win. Was it triggered by the Necronomicon? Did she unknowingly reach within herself for powers lying dormant?

As she sat in furious cogitation, a part of her mind that wasn't thinking sniffed the air, still wary and restless. It wasn't good for a human mind to be in close contact with the Outer Realms for long.

The part of her mind that thought about how she thought became aware of this, and dared not poke at the tiny and fragile thought, lest it vanish. Slowly it grasped the tenuous thread of realisation. She was aware of the Outer Realms on some level, that much was clear. It hovered in the back of her mind at all times, a deadly area of thought that watched the threats from beyond like a hawk. It stirred...

...And then she gasped, as the thought came to the forefront and she suddenly felt the alien and familiar sensation of affecting the mental realm. The part of her mind suddenly became amplified, and it grew greater in her mind. The cold and infinite and unsettling sensation that any human felt in the Outer Realms turned into a bleak and howling vastness stretching to infinity of which she was the tiniest speck in the middle that hammered at her mind and tugged at her emotional control and sanity. The ominous dread of the _Necronomicon_ turned into a looming colossus of terror that seemed to reach into the skies and to the horizons, so vast was its evil and reality-spanning power even in its weakened state.

She reached out nervously with her mind, and suddenly felt the mental scape as vividly as if she had done it physically. Emboldened, she pressed on and the Outer Realms opened before her. Amidst the overwhelming horror and sense of smallness in a avast and uncaring universe came a sudden thrill, the thought that she could affect this, that this world was opened to her as, small as she was, she could go out and make herself great with the beckoning power. The rush went to her head, and elation and energy and ambition surged around every fibre of her soul.

_Holy hells_, she thought, _was this how the order's sorcerers thought_ all_ the _time? _Was this their gift and theirs alone, or could it be done by everyone if they knew how...?_

+Yes,+ said the cat suddenly, its voice ringing as clear as a bell across her opened senses. +There are others with a greater potential for limited control than others, of course, but it is a state attainable by all mortals. You are all matter of the universe, after all, and I suspect humanity has more than a little of the Outer Realm's particles coursing in its genetic stream. I may be wrong, but I can safely say that your species was destined to dethrone gods. From the moment some ape in the cradle of Africa gazed upon a fire and thought "I shall use that," humanity set itself on the path to being second to none in reality. Your specie's ambition and your inbuilt tendency for conflict are your greatest curses and gifts combined. You shall forever be at war, but you shall ever rise triumphant, and in time, you shall reforge the stars themselves.+

Coraline almost didn't hear him, so intent was she upon the new world ringing around her. She felt powerful, unstoppable, like she could run and fight forever and never have to …

+But that shall only come to pass if your species survives the war on earth,+ said the cat firmly and coldly, +And at the moment they are hard-pressed and are on the edge of total defeat. So take the _Necronomicon_'s power for your own, and end this war _now_.+

Coraline's hands folded into fists as she turned to the _Necronomicon. _A corner of her mouth curled upwards in a smile.

Slowly, with care, she reached out for its will. She stared into its vast and undying darkness, and suddenly sprang forward for its heart, loosed like a bolt of lightning from the storm. She charged on, unstoppable in her mind, hammering aside the fragments of her memory that it threw at her. The image of the Other Mother, towering and tall with a needle and thread in her hands, shattered as Coraline bulled through it and onwards to the _Necronomicon._ The Other Coraline loomed before her and was knocked aside.

**Stop!** The _Necronomicon_ screamed in fury and panic and pain, grasping for something, anything, that would so much as slow her down. **I can help you! We can end the fighting now! I can free the others, aid your crusade, avenge your parents, but only stop where you are! PLEASE!**

She didn't stop. In a last-ditch effort to preserve its existence, the _Necronomicon_ threw forth the images of the kitchen from so long ago. Her dad, his throat oozing congealed blood, sprawled across the floor, his mouth mouthing wordless accusations. Her mom, throat crushed and eyes bulging, stared at her with fury. The kitchen span around her, red and hateful and red and death-filled and _red_, a never-ceasing barrage of horror and death and blood and the brutality of the gods...

She pushed through it with a scream of effort and leapt through the air to the final refuge of the Outer God. She hung in the air, suspended by her determination and anger and desire for revenge, and the Necronomicon reeled before her as it scrabbled for a defence, for the courage for a last stand that was doomed to fail.

She bore down upon it, buckling its middle and dashing its will to the ground, and reached down and tore out its heart.

**Nooo...oo...o**, wailed the last fragments of the _Necronomicon, _which howled and then drifted and then vanished as if hurled away by a wind. It fell silent forever.

And then it was finished. Or this part at least.

Her body staggered where it stood, drained by the last match of wills. She didn't feel any different, but maybe it needed a few minutes for the power to kick in. Ulthar looked up at her curiously.

"Er," she said. This didn't seem enough.

"Er, so do I have to do anything, or …"

* * *

- and as his hand grasped the handle, the Pink Palace exploded.

The middle of the house blew outwards with a rush of crackling energy, sweeping away Nyarlathotep and most physical matter in the vicinity Timbers and cement and plaster exploded outwards in a horizontal ring of debris that rushed like a tidal wave out from the sides and crashed into and around the startled defenders and invaders alike. A volley of wall chunks hammered down a platoon of cultists, the disintegrating kitchen sink flew into a cluster of rangers, a shoggoth was brained by the Monstrosity, and the last thing one of the Chinese soldiers saw was an armoire approaching him at terminal velocity.

The attic of the Pink Palace descended gracefully downwards, inasmuch as a ton of jagged timbers and masonry in the shape of a roof can descend gracefully, with a roar of rushing air and shattering wood and a heartfelt cry of "CHTO ZA HUY?" erupting from Mr Bobinsky's throat as it plummeted downwards and crashed into the wreckage.

A stunned silence ruled the roost for a few brief moments, before there was a splintering of timbers from the collapsed Pink Palace. Mr Bobinsky ripped open the shattered remains of the door with one great heave, and turned to check on the others in the scant light let in. Miss Lovat lay unconscious next to her sniper nest, but was unharmed. Miss Spink swore and struggled at a bowl that had become wedged on her head during the fall, Miss Forcible lay on a chair blinking and looking around in a concussed manner, and the caged mice and escaped chicken let loose a cacophony of squeaks and squawks.

And in the middle of his home was a protrusion of vertical and jagged planks, made vertical by their impact onto something that had stood below them.

Just as he reached for them to pull them aside, they suddenly shifted in the air, and folded aside to let Coraline step out. Once she was out, they folded back across the floor.

"C...Caroline?" said Mr Bobinsky with astonishment. "But I … have you finished reading? What happened down there? How did you survive the fall..."

Coraline raised a finger to her lips, and Mr Bobinsky fell silent.

"Keep your head down," she said, and somehow Bobinsky could tell this wasn't the same Caroline that had started reading the book. This one almost seemed to radiate power, shining like a beacon in the darkness of the sundered house. She carried herself with ease, and he could almost swear that tendrils of lightning flashed in the centre of her eyes.

"I know what I have to do," she continued. "You help the hurt into the palace, or what's left of it at least, and stay on guard at the entrance. I'll be able to keep the horde suppressed, but keep an eye out just in case."

"What are you going to do?" he managed.

"I'm going to save the world," she said. "But first I'm going to find Nyarlathotep, and I'm going to rip out the bastard's spine and play it like an accordion." With that, she stepped out the door, and into the snow-filled night.

A hundred yards away at the treeline, Nyarlathotep dug the body out of the long groove he had left in the earth, and picked splinters and bits of roof and exploded tree out of its coat while he thought furiously. What the hell could have caused that? It wasn't a human explosive, it was too much a creation of the Outer Realms for it to be mistaken as anything but. It couldn't have been the Necronomicon acting under its own will either, he recognised its aura when he felt it, and that had been too different from the norm. Furthermore, it had the stink of humanity about it.

That left one conclusion. The girl must have won against the _Necronomicon_. Impossibly, unthinkably – she had won.

Well, if humanity wanted to make a proper fight of this, then he would give them the pleasure. All their hopes placed in that figure would be obliterated before the night was done.

He strode forward, keeping the gun levelled, and called out his challenge to the figure crackling with energy.

"Hear me, Coraline! If you fight me, you shall lose! Your new-found power shall not help you and your strength will be of no use against me. If you stand down, I will grant you a quick death and extend the same mercy to your friends and allies. But if you fight me, then your screams and those of your loved ones shall live on long after your deaths. I am the Crawling Chaos! I am the Nemesis of Humanity, and you cannot win against me!"

After a moment's pause, Coraline raised her head and locked gazes with Nyarlathotep, whose eyes were hidden behind Wybie's skull mask. Her face betrayed shock when she saw whom he had possessed, and then set in pure determination.

"I'm Coraline Wednesday Jones the Storm-Bringer," she said, gathering a nimbus of power around her, a flickering field of electric-blue lightning set against the darkness summoned by Nyarlathotep. "And you are nowhere near as scary as you think you are."


	25. Guns Blazing

From the outside, the battle between Coraline and Nyarlathotep was a storm that filled the world.

Swathes of fire cracked and clashed against each other in the chaotic maelstrom surrounding the Pink Palace, the falling snow twisting and uncoiling as even the air currents were battered by waves of pure force. Sheets of eldritch light reached into the dark skies and locked horns with one another as they shifted and pushed for dominance. Lightning flashed and tore through trees and mountains and bodies alike as god fought god in a fight which shook the earth.

Lovecraft ducked to avoid an earthing tendril of lightning as he heaved a limp ranger into the attic. He scanned the battlefield desperately for any sign of Coraline, but there was nothing, nothing but paralysed cultists and creatures and scorched earth and strewn corpses and shattered trees, all thrown into a shifting and eerie light by the storm overhead. There was no sign of Nyarlathotep either, nor the Lovat boy. Lovecraft had a sinking feeling that Nyarlathotep had claimed him as his last host.

"What the hell is going on?" yelled Sergeant Foley over the thunder outside, standing to Lovecraft's right and shepherding the remaining ranger teams into the attic. "Has the girl finished reading?"

"She has," yelled back Lovecraft, "And she's fighting one of the Outer Gods. There's nothing we can do now but keep our heads down and our hopes up. If she wins here, then we win all across the world. If not..."

The sentence trailed off there, the meaning clear. Lovecraft and Foley saw the remaining soldiers in, the last of which was Major Song with a blood-soaked bandage over one eye and an unconscious trooper over her shoulder. She nodded at Lovecraft and Foley as she passed, and they silently walked into the attic and closed the door behind them.

The dimly-lit space was thick with pain, unease, and the fug of sweat and desperation. The able milled and fretted and attended to the wounded, who were spread out on sheets on tables or supported in chairs. Miss Spink and Forcible, now recovered, were attempting some sort of brew-up with a battery powered kettle. Miss Lovat was still knocked out. Mr Bobinsky, in the absence of direction from Lovecraft or the two commanders, was barking orders in the cramped conditions, directing help to where it was most needed and stationing guards at the windows and doors.

Lovecraft essayed a glance at his watch. It was two o'clock in the morning.

They waited silently amidst the moans and muffled orders and muttering from within the attic as the world without was torn apart.

"Is this usual?" asked Foley after a time. "I mean, this firework display here. Is this usual when Outer Gods fight?"

"No. Other times, they're more restrained than this," said Lovecraft.

"Why the difference?"

"Because this isn't a matter of humiliating the other, or driving them away, or anything like a normal battle between Outer Gods. This time, they're both fighting to kill. And because Coraline is new to her power, she'll swing it like a club, like a flail around her head that she's just picked up. She won't restrain herself like Nyarlathotep will. He'll keep his in reserve and wait until she betrays a weakness. Then he'll strike."

"Who's your money on?"

"I can't tell you," said Lovecraft, shaking his head. "I honestly couldn't."

The two men glanced out of a window, and the sky flashed electric-blue as thunder pealed and the roof shuddered. All they could do now was watch.

* * *

From the inside, the battle narrowed to two points of utter clarity amidst the storm; Nyarlathotep striking forth with all the focused and terrible power the Outer Realms could bring to bear, and Coraline lashing out with power she had just came into, with a skill she had just learned about, against an enemy whose cruelty and cunning knew no bounds, in defence of a single point of light amongst the stars.

They had both struck first, Nyarlathotep lunging straight at Coraline's heart, intending to burn out her soul. Coraline had instinctively struck at him at the same time, unsure of how much power she could bring to bear as she reached for the essence of it in the world around her. A vast wave bursting from her will and sending Nyarlathotep into a desperate dive to avoid it had assured her that it would be sufficient.

But even as Nyarlathotep had turned, Coraline had become aware of multiple great spikes of dark power erupting all around her and driving straight to her. She had drawn upon her new-found sorceric will to knock some aside and dodged the others, but even as she did that, new ones formed around her. Her own power moved to intercept them, fast as chain lightning, and in no time at all her mind was co-ordinating a magical battle that swelled and swelled. Titanic volumes of energy and magic had collided with one another in the air, and off-target and deflected sorcery burst and resolved itself into random matter and energy in the air.

All this happened in the space of a few seconds on the mental scape, even as Wybie's body raised the gun and sighted down its barrel at Coraline. Nyarlathotep pulled the trigger, and time seemed to slow for Coraline as the bullet sped forwards in the air. Then a sudden idea clicked in her mind halfway, through the bullet's flight. If matter and space could be warped by her will, then...

Time itself warped to her will, as she focused upon it and diverted the merest aspect of her mind to slowing it. The bullet slowed, and then crept down to a snail's pace in the air. The sword across Coraline's back flew into her hands and slashed forward, a silver ghost in the air, to knock aside the bullet. In the same motion, she sprang forward at Nyarlathotep.

The gun barrel swung out to meet the sword blade, and Nyarlathotep pushed forwards until he was face to face with Coraline. Behind the green lights of the skull mask, Coraline could see something else stirring, and smiling at her resistance.

"If I must follow this through to the bitter end, Storm-Bringer, then I shall," Nyarlathotep spat in a voice that was Wybie's, yet exactly like the Man in White's in its self-assuredness and mocking edge. "And you shall die. Just like your parents." And with that, he pulled back in a blur even to Coraline's eyes, and dashed the gun stock with lighting speed into her belly. The wind rushed out of her as she fell backwards, and she crumpled to the ground as Nyarlathotep stepped forward so quickly he was only a grey blur in the air.

_Speed up, speed up_, Coraline desperately willed herself. _Speed up to his level and beyond, and __**kill**__ him_. She refocused her will, and leapt to her feet just as the gun stock whirled round at her head. She parried it with the rapier, and stabbed at Nyarlathotep again. He parried the blow, and their weapons began to leap back and forth between them at a speed beyond that of sound. Their battle reflected on the battle without, which sent arcs of fire leaping up into the sky.

"Yes! That's the spirit!" whooped Nyarlathotep. "Pretend you can beat me. Fight with whatever pathetic skill you can muster and show me something you'd call a fight. Your parents died weeping like cowards, but you're much more fun."

"DON'T CALL THEM COWARDS!" she screamed, driving at the grinning god all the faster and all the more furiously, her rapier lashing at him again and again as his gun whirled and deflected every blow.

"Why not? They were cowards." Nyarlathotep's eyes gleamed behind the mask. "Your father pissed himself and sobbed as I stepped towards him with my razor. He bawled like a child and begged me to take your mother instead when I drew it across his throat. And your mother wailed as I killed him, and when I turned my blade upon her she screamed for me to _"Take Coraline! Please, don't kill me, take my daughter, I'll give her to you, just please don't hurt me!" _I tortured her before she died, and she begged for me to take you instead of her every second. You were nothing to them! You ranked below their worthless hides!"

Nyarlathotep always enjoyed a good taunt. It hurt the victim without the need for a weapon, it distracted them, and it made it easier for himself to disarm and destroy them. Stabbing them in their resolve and twisting the blade could win you a battle outright. But that wasn't the case this time.

Coraline knew he was lying. The words hurt her, but she knew they were false. They didn't drive her to despair or give her pause or even distract her. They upset her, but that was all. An upset she turned into anger. An anger she turned into fury. A fury she fed to the limitless furnace burning in her soul and which drove her onwards and gave strength to her strokes and a impact behind her blows. Her lightning flashed all the brighter, her sword swung all the swifter, and the battle escalated as she tapped upon more and more energy flowing through the fibres of the universe.

But beyond the storm of force that was herself and the dark vortex that was Nyarlathotep, she could feel something else. Something that was distant, but unmistakably vast. It was immense in scope, and slowly, particle by particle, grew larger as the battle went on... She put it from her mind. She had to focus on what was before her.

Nyarlathotep, for his part, was becoming, if not scared, then at least distinctly unnerved.

This battle was a farce. It ought to have been over by now. It ought to have been over a thousand times over. But this insufferable ape-descendant, who should have reduced to nothing but a little disembodied scream floating across the gulfs of the universe forever, was still fighting.

And she was doing more than that; she was holding her ground against him. She hadn't yielded one inch or been affected by his own power yet. Whatever he sent against her was met by an iron-cold and diamond-hard resolve which swung out and dashed aside his every foray and turned it into drifting particles on psychic winds. And her own blows staggered him when they came. He hadn't revealed any weakness or allowed them to affect him, but there was definite force behind them. And on top of everything else, this body was utterly ill-designed for fighting. It wasn't nimble enough, the strength was sub-par, the back was slightly bent in a way which reduced his ability to fight to his full potential, it was too short to effectively wield the gun as a staff, and the original mind kept struggling and biting as his own at a time when he could scarce afford any distractions or needless energy expended.

And then as the tiniest of coils of sorcery from her slipped past his defences and scratched against his will at the same time as her blade cut into his body's forearm, Nyarlathotep began to have a brooding, growing and intensely _bad feeling about this_.

Right. Time to escalate this.

One of his body's hands jabbed the gun out at her face, a swift weak blow intended to make her duck more than anything else, while the other grabbed at the skull mask and tore it off. Eyes the colour of hell were revealed. His opponent was still a human at heart and would,_ must_, be unable to look upon his eyes and all they held. All that waited beyond the universe could be a little hard to grasp when received by only one of the meagre senses of a limited mind.

Coraline anticipated the action and, averting her gaze as his eyes stabbed forth, swung the rapier up blindly to slam into and penetrate an inch into the flesh of Wybie's chest. The action's sudden failure and the physical pain shot simultaneously through Nyarlathotep's mind like a soldering iron. The coupled pain and disorientation scraped at his composure, and in the brief second that fury ruled him, he unleashed a blast of raw sorcery that hammered into Coraline's physical form and sent her staggering backwards.

Nyarlathotep snarled as he raised the rifle once more, aiming for her head, taking no chances.

But the brief moment of unsuppressed rage had loosened his hold on Wybie's will ever so slightly, just enough for him to burst loose with a heroic effort and reassert just enough control over his arms to send the gun flying upwards and to fire its last round into the sky.

Coraline struck then with the force of a hurricane, flying out faster than the naked eye could perceive and burying her blade up to the hilt in Nyarlathotep's chest as tendrils of sorcery struck out and tore at his will. Spitting and struggling and blind with pain and rage, Nyarlathotep struck out blindly at the gravity around them, and they began to rise into the air together, linked at the sword.

He lashed out once more. She knocked it aside. He drove a lance of pure dark power at her heart and she willed it into nothing. He struck at her again and again, mentally and physically, and each blow was turned away effortlessly and ignored as her own mental attacks escalated and her sword sawed at his flesh.

And finally, a hundred feet in the air, suspended in a rippling lightning-blue column of flickering energy as thick as a redwood and as powerful as a storm, she made an end of things. She hammered home a series of physic assaults, each of which broke apart Nyarlathotep's defences further and finally shattered them apart. The rapier twisted in his chest and she shot a bolt of pure coruscating energy at his mental form, which tore into it. Nyarlathotep subsided, and then and there she summoned mental barriers that hooked into him and rasped across his will. They were impervious to his attacks. They shrank and tightened and ripped into him the more he fought. Eventually, he stopped fighting. Then she had won.

They hung in the air for a long time before Nyarlathotep spoke.

"Enjoy your worthless victory," he spat from blood-flecked lips. "Enjoy it while you can, for you will have little time to do so."

"You think your servants will finish destroying the world? Forget about it, I'll destroy them as well. I'll kill them all and repair the damage you've done."

"Fool of a human," gurgled Nyarlathotep. "Even you can't fight what comes for your world. The first time you'll know of him is when he'll crest the horizon. The next time will be when he'll unmake your world utterly. You will cease to be in all times, all space. You will be gone forever when he arrives."

"What? What the hell are you talking about?" When Nyarlathotep only laughed, she shook him viciously. "Tell me what you're talking about, or I'll damn well tear it from you!"

"So we become those we fight," sniggered Nyarlathotep, and then he howled as a spike of power drove into his ravaged form and _twisted_ as Coraline screamed "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?"

"Yog-Sothoth," managed Nyarlathotep finally. "The Lurker that Lies Between. The All-in-One. The greatest of the Outer Gods, the greatest of all our kin, and the most powerful being in reality and unreality and beyond!" He raised one hand skywards, and Coraline looked upwards and saw that the relentless clouds had finally cleared, revealing a perfect night sky for the first time in weeks. Except...

Except it wasn't perfect. There was something a bit off.

"What am I looking at?" she said warily.

"Look at what isn't there," replied Nyarlathotep.

Coraline looked. And realised with horror what wasn't there.

The sky was blank in places it shouldn't have been. Patches of stars were gone entirely. Orion had lost his belt and half his chest. Andromeda was looking threadbare. Sirius was _gone_. The stars were going out. And in the darkness left in their wake, something moved, slightly. The feeling of something vast that she had felt during the fight grew again, and a feeling of immeasurable cosmic horror stole down her spine and earthed in the back of her mind.

"He comes," Nyarlathotep said in a harsh whisper. "He bears the death of your world with him. The stars themselves die in his wake. Look upon your doom, Coraline Jones, and know that you have gained nothing, _nothing_, by your victory here."

Coraline looked down at him. She met him eye to eye, and the determination behind her gaze matched the terror that Nyarlathotep could bring forth.

"Nothing," she said, "But immense personal satisfaction. This one's for you, Mom and Dad." She focused once, and followed disparate dark threads across the mental landscape to the clotted centre that was Nyarlathotep's being. He didn't resist as she reached up, didn't resist as she summoned one last great bolt of energy.

He didn't resist as she shot it into his heart, and the twisted fibres that made him up flew apart and burned and became nothing. He merely spat some last piece of spite at her as he died. She ignored him. He deserved nothing more.

It was over. Except it wasn't.

Her mind now turned to the wounded Wybie. As his will slowly spread back out into the vacated areas of his mind and self, she focused upon his wounds, and magical energy shifted into physical matter and stitched apart blood vessels and healed ruptured organs and closed up the wound in his chest where the rapier had entered, and patched up the coat for good measure.

Eventually he coughed, and opened brown clear eyes. He looked up at Coraline, who held him by the shoulders. He looked down at the ground a hundred feet below. He shook his head briskly to shake off any fog left by Nyarlathotep. Eventually he spoke.

"Did we win?"

"Er, I'm not sure to begin here..."


	26. Paragon of Animals

It was a few moments later.

Wybie picked his way over slumped bodies and churned earth, through patches of darkest shadow and the eerie afterlight of the magical duel, uphill to the Pink Palace and the waiting remnants of the defenders.

As he approached, he could make out faces peering out of windows and eyes appearing at gashes in the walls. The door creaked open and Lovecraft clambered out into the night. He strode straight towards Wybie, his eyes alive with curiosity. He opened his mouth to speak, and Wybie wearily held up a gloved hand, stopping him before he could speak.

"Nyarlathotep's dead. Coraline's left," he said, and enjoyed for a moment the sight of Lovecraft's jaw dropping and eyes visibly bulging.

"Bu...tha...how..." Lovecraft composed himself, and then spoke coherently. "Pardon me. You say Nyarlathotep's dead?"

"Yes," said Wybie, drawing upon his dim memories of the battle as he kneaded his head with both hands, a battle which he suspected had been going on in more dimensions that he could appreciate, and which had flowed before him while he was helpless and only able to observe. "He possessed me just before she came back. They fought physically and with magic, from what I could tell. Coraline dealt with him," - Wybie saw no point in mentioning his scant input - "But when he was dying, he spoke to her about how something else more powerful was coming to take his place. Yog-Sothoth, that was the name he mentioned. He gloated about how we would all die before Coraline finished him off. I came to, and when she helped clear things up for me, she asked me to leave a message."

"What was the message?"

* * *

"_I'm going to do what I can against Yog-Sothoth. Tell the order to help rebuild the world once I've finished with things."_

_She had told Wybie that, and told him again and again and made him repeat it until his delivery was word-perfect. She knew it would be important that both parts were heeded._

_The second part would be necessary if humanity was to stage a comeback. An experienced and organised order well-versed in the Outer Realms, even a decimated one, would be invaluable in healing the world. Her godly senses had expanded outwards after the high emotions of the battle had faded away, and they had spared no details in showing her how badly the world had been hit. Countless cities had become charnel-houses of slaughter and torture as the Outer Realms had torn them apart or the inhabitants had turned on themselves. Swathes of the world were blackened with pestilence and war and whole countries had been reduced to wastelands. And the death toll..._

_What was the quote? "One death is a tragedy: a million is a statistic." Huge numbers could easily desensitise people, with their sheer size being hard to comprehend. But gods, especially those possessing a human sense of conscience, were spared any such desensitisation, and all **three billion** of the dead of Earth scored weeping lines across her soul. Image after image hammered at her mind, atrocity after atrocity forcing her to shut off her input for the sake of her very sanity. And even then, she could still feel the weight of the dead. She could could feel the horror in which they had died, at the hands of the Outer Realms or merciful suicide or at the gnawing emptiness of starvation._

_And she took the massed dead and claimed them as her responsibility. She took their weight and compressed it and put it through the purifying crucible that brooded like a storm cloud in the centre of her mind and it came out as a focused desire for vengeance, chilly in its desire and terrifying in its clarity, a certainty that any more interference from the Outer Realms would come only after her last breath._

_Leading her rather neatly onto the first part._

_To hell with the Necronomicon. To hell with Nyarlathotep. To hell with Yog-Sothoth and all those trans-dimensional bastards who played with lives like cats with trapped mice. She had already taken down two of them, and even if she couldn't take down this one, she would at least leave it with scars that would last forever._

_

* * *

_

"Rebuild the world."

"Yes. And she had her determined face on when she said it, so you probably don't get to argue."

"Hmm," said Lovecraft. He sighed and scratched his head. "Lavinia's still stationed in the UN Headquarters. I can contact her and begin co-ordinating reparation efforts now. It'll be long and costly, but we will make sure it's done."

"She also said afterwards that she's made it easier for you to get started right away."

"Would it have anything to do with this, perchance?" Lovecraft swept an arm expansively around the Pink Palace. The field was strewn with the corpses of cultists and Outer Realms creatures, dead where they had dropped by the legion. Here and there, a few stumbling figures picked their way through the dead field. A handful of former cultists, broken out of whatever eldritch spell had been placed upon them, either staggered or stared in confusion or broke down and wept in their surroundings.

"I'll just be a moment," said Lovecraft, stepping away from Wybie and towards the awakened cultists as behind him, the inhabitants of the Pink Palace began to emerge.

* * *

_Before she had left, she had given the Earth one last piece of comfort. She didn't know how deep her reserves of borrowed energy ran, or how much she would need to deal with Yog-Sothoth, but she felt she could do this at least._

_Stepping sideways in space after giving Wybie a farewell hug, she had found herself above the world, and she cast her mind about for the Outer Realms. She had found it on the surface in the remaining Great Old Ones and their still-numberless servants and the millions of human cultists._

_She struck out wherever the questing tendrils led her, trusting in the beings of the Outer Realms being stunned by the knock-down effect and magical reverberations of an Outer God meeting his end, and she had not been disappointed. The Great Old Ones on Earth had fought and butchered and demanded sacrifice from and tortured the inhabitants since day one. They had given no mercy. They received none. Their creatures had demanded no effort on Coraline's part, with their lives being snuffed out like candles as their master's energies vanished._

_As for the cultists … Those who had been compelled by Outer Realms influence, or had been confused, or held the hope for redemption, or whose minds demanded freedom from the Outer Realms yoke, she made them free. Humanity would need all the individuals it would get, and those who weren't responsible for their actions deserved mercy. But to those who had been monsters from the start and to those whose minds and bodies had been broken again and again until there was nothing left to salvage or to come back to, she … gave them peace. It was necessary, she told herself. In some cases, it was even merciful. That didn't make her feel any better._

_And once she was finished, she shifted sideways through space once more, and then she was gone._

_

* * *

_

It was some time later.

On the horizon crept forward the beginnings of dawn, the pink-and-orange of the trim clashing with the darkness of the rest of the sky. Rosy fingers edged across a scarred landscape and over a gradually re-uniting world.

Wybie sat against a boulder beside the old well, the fairy circle of toadstools around the well rim slowly growing back in. He had wandered off to be by himself for a while, but before he could even begin to marshal his emotions, exhaustion had hit him like a brick to the head and he had just lain there in the cool night air. His eyes had never closed, as much as he would have loved them to, and his ears had picked up the sound of the people around the Pink Palace moving and talking and doing various human things.

It was hard to tell in the gloom, but he thought the fires in Ashland had finally gone out. The unmarred night sky had come at the cost of a gradually rising aroma from the millions of bodies, of course, but you couldn't have everything.

He could hear footsteps crunching through the snow to his right, and he turned to see Lovecraft walking towards him.

"Your grandmother, when she regained consciousness, told me you might be here," Lovecraft said. "Do you mind if I sit down?"

Wybie shook his head, and Lovecraft settled down against the boulder next to him. For a long moment, they sat together, lost in their own thoughts.

"I phoned Lavinia," said Lovecraft, breaking the silence. "Efforts are already underway to organise rebuilding in the worst-hit areas. We should also be getting transport later today, or the day later depending on weather conditions."

"Great," said Wybie quietly.

"I also found Abra amongst the wreckage," said Lovecraft more quietly.

Wybie didn't speak. There were no words which he knew he could say, and he suspected Lovecraft preferred to keep his grieving private. Out of respect, he gave Lovecraft a few minute's more silence. He didn't trust himself to look at the man's face.

The few minutes passed, and Lovecraft, with barely a tremor, said, "Our fates are in Coraline's hands now. If she holds off Yog-Sothoth, then we've won forever and always. If she loses … then our passing will be quick at least. All we can do now is attend to the tasks in front of us, and repair the damage when we see it."

He turned to Wybie, and Wybie, facing him, finally saw Lovecraft stripped bare. He saw not a poised and powerful vanquisher of the Outer Realms he had become, nor the arrogant writer who nurtured dreams of becoming an astronomer he had once been, but the simple core of the matter. He saw a weary and nearly broken old man who had forced himself into battle nearly every day of his life, and who saw a hard-earned bittersweet ending to his life's work on the horizon at long last.

"Do you think she'll win, Wybourne?" the old man asked. "You knew her best. You saw her at close quarters. Do you think she can fight Yog-Sothoth and win?"

"If she can't do it, Mr Lovecraft," said Wybie, "Then no one else can. And I know she won't stop at anything to make sure that it doesn't get what it wants."

Lovecraft sat back, satisfied with the answer. The sun rose a tiny further.

"Mr Lovecraft?"

"Hmm?"

"When you're organising the world's governments, trying to stop old enmities from flaring up, and just trying generally to rebuild things..."

"Yes?"

"Will you need an assistant?"

* * *

In the cold void of the universe, stars and space on every side and darkness enveloping her soul, Coraline met Yog-Sothoth for the first and last time.

Here in the unforgiving and endless and dark depths, the impression of Yog-Sothoth was a great deal more pronounced. Or perhaps it had simply grown larger. It was a dark ocean of endless empty space, a void of pure amoral malice which blazed with the force of a thousand cold stars. It filled the universe. It _was_ the universe. It was Yog-Sothoth the Alll-in-One.

She stopped there and looked around. Even from her altered position in space, she could still recognise many of the stars and constellations from Earth, and they were looking no less threadbare than before. The familiar patterns were almost all gone, replaced with nothing and nothing but nothing. Even as she looked, the last and easternmost star of Orion's belt flickered a last and futile defiance and then winked out.

She raised her head, and yelled with all her might, on both the mental and physical realms, for Earth's sake and humanity's sake and for the last star's sake, "Here I stand, Yog-Sothoth! Face me if you dare!"

Yog-Sothoth stopped, and then investigated.

Coraline suddenly became aware of a unbelievably vast and incomprehensibly alien will turning upon her. It drifted down with ease, and it grew and grew as Coraline tensed. It didn't stop growing, and Coraline realised with horror that what she had sensed before was only the merest part of something so far over her head it wasn't even funny. Beyond a infinite will as pure of purpose as a knife and yet as unreadable as pitch-darkness, there was desolation stretching out to the end of reality. And to Coraline's horror, even then the mind didn't stop growing, didn't stop increasing in magnitude and terror-inducing scale, and she knew then why Yog-Sothoth hadn't already extinguished the world. It had simply taken this long because it had been busy gathering all its disparate elements from opposite ends of all that existed.

And now she had – oh gods – she had _piqued its interest_, and now it was speeding up the process just to get a look at her.

The universe around her almost seemed to scream as the mind focused down upon her, screaming echoed by a tiny treacherous part of her mind which yelled at her to run.

As she hung in empty air, tiny and alone, the physical space before her warped and bubbled, cracking where Yog-Sothoth exerted but a tiny part of itself on the fabric of the universe. It shifted into a conglomeration of glowing points and spheres in the air, a medley of kaleidoscopic alien colours and hues that was the closest that all of Coraline's senses could get to comprehending the true form of the thing taking shape before her. There were dimensions and layers of reality that even her god-granted senses couldn't pick up on. There were dimensions and layers of reality for this thing alone, so vast and all-encompassing was it.

And then on each of the thousands of iridescent lights appeared a face. Handsome faces, brutal faces, men's faces, women's faces, children's faces, faces which she shuddered to even glance at, all took form and looked down upon her with contempt, with curiosity, with a malicious glee, with a chilling blankness.

And as one, with the voice of the legion, they spoke.

_WHO ARE YOU?_

Coraline tried to speak, found her throat had grown dry, and tried again. A strangled noise fought to come out.

"Erk," she said to the Lurker at the Threshold. A thousand gazes locked her in place and issued their call once more.

_WHO ARE YOU?_


	27. The Strange Aeon

_WHO ARE YOU?_

Coraline closed her eyes, lost in the face of this monster beyond monsters. The Storm-Bringer opened them again.

"I'm Coraline Jones," she said, her hands on her hips and her gaze chiselled from stone. "And you are intruding upon my territory."

Yog-Sothoth seemed to ignore her, its faces showing no reaction to her words. Thousands of faces amongst the countless shifting circles flared brightly and drifted closer, their different expressions betraying curiosity and appraisal and contempt and, on a handful of them, a distinct uncertainty.

_WHAT ARE YOU? YOU … ARE WRONG. YOUR WILL IS THAT OF A MORTAL, BUT YOUR PRESENCE IS THAT OF ONE OF THE OUTER GODS. EXPLAIN YOURSELF._

"Easily," said Coraline. "I took the power of a god from one of you. I sought out the Necronomicon, and I tore its power from its heart and claimed it as my own. And then I fought Nyarlathotep, and I killed him as well."

Other faces appeared amidst the miasma, some betraying surprise, others radiating satisfaction and even some showing boredom.

_THE NECRONOMICON'S DEATH DOES NOT SURPRISE US. IT WAS MORTAL-MADE, CORRUPTED AND DEBASED SINCE BIRTH. BUT YOUR DEFEAT OF NYARLATHOTEP IS MORE SURPRISING._ The faces bored down into Coraline through narrowed eyes, and then there was a collective shrug. _HIS REACH ALWAYS EXCEEDED HIS GRASP. PERHAPS HE HAS SOME DORMANT PLAN TO RESURRECT HIMSELF FROM STAR-MATTER, BUT WE DOUBT IT. HIS FASCINATION WITH MORTALS WAS ONLY EXCEEDED BY HIS ARROGANCE, AND HE WOULD HAVE SCORNED SUCH SAFEGUARDS._

_TELL US,_ the faces said as one, all blazing in the void and weaving the voice of Yog-Sothoth from all of theirs united. _WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SPEAK OF "YOUR TERRITORY"?_

"Earth is mine," said Coraline. "It's where I was born, it's where I lived, and it's where I and my species shed our blood in its defence against you and your kind. I lost my parents and I killed two Outer Gods in retaliation. I claim it as mine by dint of my power and my duty to it, and I shall fight any who threaten it. Including you." There, she thought. That sounded suitably determined and heroic.

It didn't have much effect on Yog-Sothoth, whose faces just regarded her as they would an alien creature.

_YOUR CLAIM IS MEANINGLESS,_ they said. _ALL THINGS ARE OURS. THE EARTH, HUMANITY, YOURSELF, ALL ARE OURS AND ALL COMPOSE OUR WHOLE. THE VOIDS OF SPACE ARE OURS. THE STARS LIVE AND DIE BY OUR DECREE. WE ARE LEGION, FOR WE ARE ALL THAT EXISTS, AND IT IS OUR WILL THAT YOUR PLANET BECOME NOTHING. YOU CANNOT STOP US. WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU WISH TO._

"Because it's my home," growled Coraline. "Because it's the home to billions of living, thinking, creating people who stand opposed to you and all your ideals. You'd snuff out a light in the darkness because of a whim. You'd kill a songbird amidst silence because it interfered with a pattern of your making. And you could do anything like that whenever you liked until now. I've got the power of a god that I'm ready to use to destroy you, and I'm getting the hang of it already. And that makes me responsible for defending earth against that which it can't handle on its own. "With great power comes great responsibility." Spiderman said that, you know," she added judiciously.

Yog-Sothoth absorbed the declaration, took it apart in its mind, tried to understand it, gave up on some bits, and latched onto one important detail that it was clear that this impertinent new god had missed.

_BUT YOU CANNOT DESTROY US,_ said a million faces looking down condescendingly at Coraline. _THAT WOULD DESTROY THE UNIVERSE._

"_Congruous with all space and time,"_ piped up Lovecraft from the back of Coraline's memory, the only noise in Coraline's shocked mind. If Lovecraft hadn't been mistaken, and Yog-Sothoth wasn't lying – and what creature with the capacity to remake reality with a thought would feel the need to lie? - then all her effort could be for nought.

But another part of her mind said "_So what if we can't kill it? That doesn't mean we can't hurt it. So __**hurt**__ it already."_

Coraline breathed out, preparing her next move carefully. She planned it around the insight offered by that part of her mind. If she was right, she might win yet … and if not …

How could she take it on? It encompassed the entirety of reality and beyond, and the power it could bring to bear was presumably infinite … if it got a chance to draw upon all of it. Before then, it would have to draw itself together, and would only use staggering amounts of power rather than overwhelming amounts. If she could get in one powerful, precise, and swift strike before it even started moving – but where would she strike?

It was all things, but it had a mind, that much was clear. Somewhere amidst its endless coils of encroaching void-matter, there must be something she could take out that would cripple it. There had to be some vital artery in the pathway of its being or some node she could rip apart. That would be what her victory would depend upon. Assuming it had such a thing. Assuming she could find it before Yog-Sothoth destroyed her. Assuming it wasn't ready to destroy her there and then.

So, in summary; all she had to do was fight a terrible battle based on uncertain theories against nigh-impossible odds in order to preserve everything she had ever known.

Oh, good. No pressure.

No second chances.

No real hope of victory.

And no quarter given.

She summoned all the power left to her and drew it around her in shifting coils and bands of coruscating electric-blue light. She became a star of pure light and power suspended in infinite darkness, and the faces of Yog-Sothoth showed anticipation and confusion and anger.

_WHAT DO YOU IMAGINE YOU ARE-_

She loosed herself then, blazing into the night with the force of a shooting star and scarring a white-hot line across space. The faces blurred closer, and all raged at her progress.

_YOU SHALL NOT WIN_, screamed a million mouths. _YOU ABOMINATE ALL THAT IS ORDER IN THE UNIVERSE. YOU SHALL KNOW SUCH AGONIES AS CANNOT BE ENDURED FOR A THOUSAND TIMES A THOUSAND AEONS. YOU SHALL BURN ALONG WITH YOUR WORLD, YOUR SPECIES, YOUR HOPES._

_YOU. CANNOT. WIN!_ And at the height of its roar, Coraline hammered through the barrier of faces.

Time stood still for one moment there, as fracture lines skidded up and across the faces spreading to infinity, as the first line of Yog-Sothoth's will met Coraline, as the faces held for but a moment and delayed Coraline's progress for but a fraction of a nanosecond...

...And then the wall descended in thin shattered fragments, each face-fragment screaming as it fell in a shower that was far behind the accelerating Coraline. The howl of the greatest of all gods sounded across all space as she shot on and into the heart of the storm that awaited her.

Everywhere there was darkness. Everywhere there was chaos, but not an undirected and mindless chaos, rather, a directed and focused chaos that erupted all around her. It struck out and clutched at her as she rocketed further into the heart of Yog-Sothoth, a screaming maelstrom within an impossibly vast labyrinth within a much, much greater being that was now entirely driving down on her and her alone.

Winds howled in the darkness, and screams followed Coraline's wake.

She sped onwards through twisting and tightening circular tunnels coated with waving tendrils like villi in a gut. They snatched at her feet, they lunged forwards to crush her between their bulk, and time warped around her as she threw everything she had into simply surviving and moving onwards.

A section of tunnel tightened swiftly around her, and she had to put on an extra burst of speed to avoid being ground to a pulp between the clashing walls. A great tendril loomed up and swept down towards her, and she curved and leapt through the air, avoiding its downswing by inches. A smaller tendril lashed up from the bottom of the dank tunnel, and she barely knocked it away with a desperate swipe of mental power.

She didn't know how far she had to go, and she was losing power by the second, and the walls were tightening, and Yog-Sothoth's laughter was echoing in the increasingly cramped confines, and the tendrils...

...The tendrils were becoming damn _claws_.

Crooked and warped and shadowy hooks and claws and stick-like fingers were cracking and peeling out from the tendrils, and they were growing larger and larger and they snatched and grabbed for her. She scraped between two, and hammered straight into an upheld palm and burst through it with a sudden all-out assault of clawing, frantic energy, but was disorientated enough so that she only just missed the next oncoming one.

She kept on moving, and frantically bent and buckled time around her once more and moved faster and faster as she rounded a sharp corner and sped down another short section of tunnel and lurched down the left fork at a crossroads in the endless winding tunnels. The walls and floors and ceilings changed position as she span in the air to avoid the grabbing tendrils, and behind her a huge mass of oncoming tendrils had taken form. They had become a vast, dark, writhing hand that filled the world behind her. She struggled to stay ahead of it, and on more than a few occasions during her dark flight one of the fingers came within a few feet of seizing her. It scuttled down the tunnels like a gargantuan spider, and one finger after another would strike out at her.

Tight tunnels and the small crevices Coraline would sometimes dash through were no obstacle to it, as it simply shed excess tendrils and tore new ones out of the wall to its form in due course.

And even as Coraline sped onwards and fought and struggled and struck out with magic, she still concentrated on a small part of her that urged her onwards, that raised its head above the raging waters of emotion and hearkened to some distant call and directed her onwards.

_Left_, it would say, and she would take a turning to the left. _Strike_, it would say, and she would tear through a section of the wall and burst through into a new tunnel. Guided by those impulses, and bolstered by her magic, and fueled with her fury, she charged on to the heart of Yog-Sothoth.

Right, it whispered, and she turned and found herself staring into a vast, wide corridor that ended at a great writhing wall of tendrils. She gathered her strength and rocketed downwards at an appreciable fraction of light-speed that still made the opposing wall move closer in her view too slowly. Behind her, the great hand rounded the corner and pounced, its fingers outspread and its nails as sharp and long as claws.

In front of her, as she moved closer to the end, the tendrils coating the wall suddenly coalesced and took the form of a hand as well in less than an instant. She watched as it leapt forward as well, and as it blurred towards her and the space around her darkened with the shadows of the oncoming hands...

… she straightened and shot upwards at the most extreme of angles and _twisted_...

… and cleared the space between the bases of the index and middle fingers with exactly no room to spare, scraping the tip of her nose as she forced her way between them. She pushed at the limits of her energy once more, and became a lightning-shod missile streaking through the darkness as the two hands crashed into each other behind her.

But instead of disintegrating in the air upon contact, the second hand merely _insinuated_ into the first, and now there was one great hand hurtling towards Coraline with the force of a million wrecking balls.

It was all but upon her, but she was nearly at the wall, and the directing voice screamed _Strike!_, and she struck through the few writhing tendrils and lanced into the wall-matter with all the force allowed her.

She tumbled through the hole she had made, and the bulk hand impacted into the wall, with only a few stray tendrils struggling to pull themselves free and follow her through.

A great roar of fury and frustration tore loose from Yog-Sothoth, and echoed and reverberated throughout space and time, and originated from the chamber in which Coraline now hovered.

She was at one of the sides in a great sphere, the walls of which were lined with yet more waving tendrils, a great waving sea of horrors waving on all sides and across all dimensions. The top and base were distant, and the opposite side was so far away as to reduce the tendrils to a black-grey blur. And in the centre, on a thin black marble circle that was suspended on thin air, something glowed.

She shot forwards, aiming for the circle, and the walls moved with her. The titanic will of Yog-Sothoth had finally begun to awaken in full, and the great sweep of its power prepared to come crashing down upon the intruder at its core. Coraline out-stripped them, the contents within the circle holding all of her attention and focusing her will to one burning point that manifested in a thought that held the court of her mind: _I shall get to that circle. It is the key._

She left a streak of white fire behind her path to the circle, a streak that that was swallowed as quickly as it appeared by the expanding wall of wall of waving tendrils. But it was no longer a wall, but rather a great oncoming force of utter destruction, given will and malice towards the spark of light at darkness's heart.

She shot across the last expanse in less than a twinkling and alighted on the circle with both feet firmly down. Coraline lost no speed, using her past momentum to propel her to the circle's centre. At it, something circular and football-sized twinkled like a jewel.

She saw it more clearly as she drew near, and saw that it seemed to be a massive diamond, many-faceted and reflecting the sparse light in the vast room a thousand-fold. At its centre, amidst its crystalline folds, something dark stirred and slithered. On the mental realm, it was a beacon of pure blazing power. It was like staring into the heart of a supernova. No. Like a black hole. It was the conduit for all the void-matter around her, for the will of Yog-Sothoth.

She stopped before, drew the rapier from her back, strengthened it with magic, and rammed it straight at the crystal.

A chip flew out of the crystal and a fine crack appeared, but it was otherwise unharmed. The darkness within twisted and flurried within the crystal, exited by the action. The all-surrounding tendrils roared closer.

"BREAK, DAMN YOU!" screamed Coraline, frantically bringing the rapier upon the crystal again and again, hacking away chips and flecks and opening new tiny cracks in the surface. The last remnants of her godly power tensed and watched the oncoming tendrils.

And as they screamed closer and came within spitting distance, the Storm-Bringer exploded outwards in a mad medley of striking bolts and a whirlwind of lightning, shuddering and halting the dark tide of power in its tracks. The storm then lashed outwards once more like a caged and enraged tiger with blazing claws. The will of Yog-Sothoth reeled back and gathered itself, and them hammered down once more, a brutal sledge-hammer swipe that broke across the coruscating shell of lightning and locked horns with it in a vicious grapple.

The sword spun and flashed in Coraline's hands, tearing at the crystal with all of her fury and determination. It stabbed once, twice, thrice, into the same spot, opening a crack further and deeper. And for the last time, Coraline drew the blade back. It was still in her hands, and she drew energy into it so that it rippled in the physical world, unable to contain the power that came off it in waves. The storm around Coraline faded, and Yog-Sothoth hesitated, unsure if this was its chance to win, or whether this was some gambit from its surprisingly determined opponent.

It decided on the former, and Yog-Sothoth drove forwards with all of its might as Coraline drove forward with hers.

In the second last instant before the battle ended, the dark tendrils tore down through the space previously held by the storm, dark lines stitching through the fading blue-white glow, while the sword in Coraline's grasp punched through the crystal and into the folds behind.

And in the last instant, the tendrils swept down and seized at Coraline, as her sword point skewered the dark writhing shadow and pinned it to the crystal wall.

And then all went white.

* * *

Blankness extended in all directions.

But it wasn't the chilly blankness of the absence of matter in the Outer Realms, but the sort of white expanse that suggests that there's so much matter and energy and reality around that it overloads even the universe's senses.

It slowly faded, shading to grey in some areas, and steadily darkened across the entire expanse while small points remained white.

The blackness faded and became space. The points remained and became stars.

And in what had been the centre of the white expanse, Coraline remained standing. Her eyes burned. Her sword gleamed, those areas of it that weren't covered by a writhing black thing that fought futilely to break free. Around her, lightning cracked and sizzled in the vacuum of space.

She leaned in close to the thing on her sword. Her eyes narrowed to pinpricks of white-hot anger that filled her mind like a gathering storm.

"Listen closely," she said in a chilling flat tone, "And listen well."

_YOU DARE-_ thundered the thing before a mental cuff knocked it flat.

"I won't kill you," said Coraline. "You're a lynchpin for reality, much as I wish you weren't, and you've got to stay alive. So be it."

"But know this, Yog-Sothoth" she snarled, drawing closer to the sword blade, "The defeat I've dealt you today can and **will** be repeated if you or any other Outer Gods dares to touch Earth. I've seen the worst you have to offer, and I'm not impressed. And there'll be more like me on the way. You've not stopped humanity. We'll rebuild. We'll grow. We'll expand. And we'll become gods in our own right. You can't hurt us any more. You can't stop us any more."

"So **go**, Yog-Sothoth. Go and spread the word to whatever gods are left. We're rising and we'll never stop. Take mindless Azathoth and whatever scraps of power you've got left and I'll leave you alone to find a pocket of the universe in which we'll never find you. For if you ever strike at us again, if you ever reclaim your old power and use it to wage war on humanity, then I will find you and I'll show you hell. I'll break you a thousand times and I'll leave you broken and bleeding and cursing the day that your kind ever discover humanity."

"Your time is over, now and forever until the universe becomes dust and nothing once more and humanity dies out, and then you can slink out with your scars to reclaim what is left. But until then, you will stay dormant and silent. It's the least you deserve for all those aeons you tortured and played with mortals like a cat with a mouse. But this is **our** aeon. This, and all the aeons after."

She flicked the blade with contempt, and the little scrap of nothing flew off and struggled through space.

_THERE WILL BE A RECKONING YET, STORM-BRINGER. THE GODS STILL RULE SUPREME, AND WE SHALL FOR ALL TIME. YOU AND YOUR FILTHY KIND SHALL PERISH IN YOUR OWN FIRES._

"Not today, and likely never," snapped Coraline. "Now begone."

The wounded husk of Yog-Sothoth flickered and sped away. It became smaller and smaller, and then became a point of darkness on the horizon, and then nothing at all.

Only then did Coraline allow herself to sag with exhaustion. She needed a rest as she had never needed one before.

But she would only allow herself a short one. She had one hell of a mess to clear up when she got back home.

* * *

Along a pleasant leafy path walked Wybie Lovat, with a clipboard and pencil in hand.

The grounds of the UN Headquarters were lovely in the autumn, and especially in the early morning sun. Trees turned the ground scarlet and gold, and the late-blooming flowers from a hundred different nations formed a tapestry of exotic colour across the grass.

It was just a week after the end of the Incursion, and already even the weather was trying to make amends. There had been a spell of days without a single cloud and where the sun bathed New York in soft and undying light. This was only a good thing for this part of the world, though. His face grew grim as he scanned the statistics for food shortages in the new People's Republic of West Africa. Some areas were going to need every cloud they could get.

There was a soft crack behind him, and he turned slowly, unconcerned. Then he caught a glimpse of the figure behind him, and he turned rather more quickly. His clipboard fell and the papers within fluttered to the ground.

"Coraline?" he said uncertainly.

"Before you say anything else, Wybie, just tell me one thing," said Coraline. "How long have I been away?"

"What? Oh … About a week."

"Okay, that's not too bad. Where are we? The UN building?"

"Yes. I'm Howard's assistant for the duration of the recovery effort," said Wybie with a touch of pride. He then remembered the fallen clipboard, and the next few minutes were spent in pursuit of the drifting papers.

"So, do I even need to ask the obvious?" he said afterwards, smiling and panting with exertion.

"We've won," said Coraline. "We've won. Yog-Sothoth won't be a threat any more. Nothing about the Outer Realms will ever be again."

"And are you still a … um … a god?"

"Let's go find Lovecraft and whatever meeting he'll be in," said Coraline, linking her arm around Wybie's. "I'll tell you about it on the way."

And they walked off together, arm in arm, both looking in different ways to rebuild humanity.

One, even as he spoke and laughed, laid out banks of numbers in his minds and the implications of the numbers. His mind worked over structures, guidelines, demographics, rules to put in place, ways to rebuild and leave a foundation that would raise humanity to its past level and beyond. His thoughts pushed humanity onwards.

The other, even as she spoke and laughed , looked outwards and scanned the horizon for the things against which humanity could not guard itself. The makings of a hurricane in the south Atlantic were dispersed with a thought. A well infected with cholera in Georgia was cleansed before a family could drink from it. Her will pulled humanity up.

They walked on along the path, secure at last against the old terrors, and with gazes set on the distant future and into the rising sun.

* * *

_Author's Afterthoughts_

_Well, that's that over and done with._

_Writing this was different from how I imagined it would go. Stories have a habit of coiling out of control whenever you take your gaze off them, and this one especially, being my first fanfiction and first piece of writing of appreciable length, kept changing and venturing into strange new territories as I was writing it. It was exhausting, exhilarating, and tremendous fun in equal measures. I'd repeat it in a heartbeat. _

_It also has the dubious honour of being the first piece of fiction I ever put into a public medium, and to my immense gratification it got a lot of positive feedback and constructive criticism. _

_On this note, I would like to thank everyone, on the internet and off it, who commented on it and encouraged me and helped me refine my style as I wrote it. Especial thanks go to Model Builder, another writer on this site, who provided invaluable commentary and advice all throughout the process of writing it. His advice was especially welcomed as he has experience in writing cross-over fics himself, two of which can be found on this website._

_Thanks goes also towards Neil Gaiman, Henry Selick, and Howard Philips Lovecraft, all of whom are or were far better in their craft than I could ever hope to be, and whose works continue to inspire fanfiction and fanart across the internet._

_And last but not least, thanks goes out to you, for reading this far and paying me the best compliment I could wish for._


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